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CALIBAN:

THE MISSING LINK.

; DANIEL WILSON, LL.D.

■KOPHSSOK OP „,STOKV ... HKCUS,. UTHK.TUKH. „..VHKS.TV CO..KCH.

TORONTO.

MACMILLAN AND CO.
1873

PR XS33

19696

(

ox FO R n:

By T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, V.. Tickard Hall, and J. H. Stacy,

PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.

€a |ant Snird,

MY SHAKESPEARE SCHOLAR.

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

VERY LOVINGLY

BY HEK FATHEE.

CONTENTS,

PREFACE .....

CHAP. r. IN' THE BEGINNING

n. THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION

HI. CALIBANS ISLAND

IV. THE TEMPEST

V. THE MONSTER CALIBAN

VI. CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN

VII. CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN
VIH. THE SUPERNATURAL

IX. GHOSTS AND WITCHES

X. FAIRY FOLK-LORE

XI. THE COMMENTATORS .

XII. THE FOLIOS
XIIL NOTES ON ' THE TEMPEST*
XIV. A MIDSUMMER NIGHt's DREAM

Paqb
vii

.39
56
67
92
114

155
166
194
21 1
222
239

PREFACE.

Thi. 1 1 . '^'^' k'lievc as soon

Th,s »l,„le earth ma, be l,o,„l. a,,.! ,hat ,l,e ,„oo„
May h.o„,.|, ,1,0 ce„„e creep, a,,,, «„ .IkpI.ee
Her l„„,l,crs noonti.le will, ,|,e A„li|,„,les
It ean„ot be.'-^ «„/.,„„,„„. Nigh,; Dr.am.

TUK Antipodes, in SLakospearc's day, were beings
or w on, .„e .orid, and all whici, pertains to it, wel
turned ups,dc down. TIk- ideas entertained of ti.em
were of the very vatjuest kind ; the capacity of belief
." regard to then, was restrained by no ordinary limits
of experience or analogy. The most that could be af-
finned w,th any confidence in regard to them, seemed
to be t at they mnst exist under conditions in all re-
spects the reverse of our own ; and with their heads if
not absolutely where their heels .should be, yet some-
where else than on their shoulder,,. The sun was below
an the earth above then,. They were manifestly being
w,tl,wh,ch fancy had free .scope to sport at will. "^

The cannibals that each other eat,' concerning whom
Othello discoursed to his adn.iring auditors, arc now
very fannhar to us. Of that other class of .anthropo-
phag,, whose heads do .grow beneath their shoulders'
oeular testimony seems more remote than ever. 'When

viii

PREFACE.

WO were boys,' says Gonzalo, in ' Tlie lenipcst,' ' who
would believe there were such men whose heads stood in
their breasts ; ' of which, nevertheless, now every New
World adventurer * will bring us good warrant.' Later
explorations, either in the regions of actual travel, or in
those of scientific research, have failed to confirm such
warranty. But somewhere outside the old world of
authenticated fact, Shakespeare found, or fashioned for
us, a being which has come, in our own day, to possess
an interest, undreamt of either by the men of the poet's
age, or by that profane generation for which Dryden
and D'Avenant revived ' The Tempest,' with changes
adapted to the prurient court of the later Stuarts.

It will need no apology to the appreciati"e student
of Shakespeare that ' the missing link ' in the evolution
of man should be sought for in the pages of him ' whose
aim was to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature ;' nor,
if it is to be recovered anywhere, will he wonder at its
discovery there. Ben Jonson said truly

• He was not of an age, but for all time.'

Much that he wrote was imperfectly appreciated even by
the men of his own day. It was too refined, too noble,
too lofty in its marvellous range of thought and feeling,
for later generations of the Restoration and Revolution
eras. It will ever fail of adequate comprehension by a
frivolous or a faithless age. Shakespeare is indeed ca-
pable of proving the source, not merely of pastime, but
of supreme delight to the mere pleasure seeker. But

PRE FACE.

there are not only passages, but whole characters in his
dramas, the force of which is wholly lost on him who
turns to them in no more serious mood than to an or-
dinary tale or novel. When such a mere dallier, as the
youthful reader is apt to be, has become a loving stu-
dent, and learned to enter into true sympathy with the
poet, he discovers a depth of meaning undreamt of
before, and catches at length the just significance of
his first admiring editors' advice ' to the great variety
of readers': — ' Read him, therefore, and again and again;
and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some
manifest danger not to understand him.'

The dramas of Shakespeare have been studied by
the present writer under very diverse circumstances.
He became possessor of the old 1632 folio in youthful
days, when it could be bought on an Edinburgh book-
stall for a few shillings. He was already accustomed
to resort to Shakespeare's pages as a source of rare
enjoyment ; and in this and other editions the great
dramatist was read, in the only way in which the spirit
of his writings is to be caught by a venerating, loving
student. In more recent years, it has been his pleasant
duty to read some of the great master's choicest works
with Canadian undergraduates, as part of the Honour
Work of the University of Toronto ; and thus — in what
was, in days greatly more recent than those of Shake-
speare, an unexplored wild of the New World, — to fulfil
the behest of his first editors : who, having commended
the reading and re-reading of the great dramatist as

PR EI' ACE.

indispensable for the true understanding of him, thus
conclude — 'And so we leave you to other of his friends,
who, if you need, can be your guides. If you need
them not, you can lead yourselves and others ; and such
readers we wish him.'

In such a study of Shakespeare, his many-sidedness,
his universality, his ever-renewing.^ modernness, startle
the reader afresh, when he has vainly fancied that he
already appreciates him at his highest worth. The
.sympathies of the man seem all-embracing. He com-
prehends every phase of human character, every im-
pulse and passion of the human soul, every conceivable
stage of development of the human mind.

In this age, which, not altogether without justifica-
tion, claims for itself a more adequate appreciation of
England's greatest poet than he has before received,
there are engrossing themes, alike in the departments
of faith and science, undreamt of in Shakespeare's day;
and, above all, there is ihat one in which science and
faith alike claim a share, which professes to furnish
entirely novel revelations of the origin of man and the
evolution of mind. By Shakespeare, I imagine, the old
narrative of what was done ' in the beginning,' was re-
ceived undoubtinf,-iy as true. As to Sir Thomas Browne,
who is accepted in the following pages as, in some
respects, the representative of a l.'.ter and very different
age, his mode of affirming his faith in the primitive
story is in this quaintly characteristic fashion : ' Whether
Eve was framed out of the left side of Adam, I dispute

PR El' ACE.

not ; because I stand not yet assured which is the right
side c.'f a man, (jr whether there be any such dis-
tinction in nature. That she was edified out of the rib
of Adam I beheve, \'et raise no question who shall
arise with that rib at tlie resurrection.'

Of such a theory or system of human descent as now
challenges universal acceptance, Shakespeare entertained
as little thought as Bacon did. The elements of its con-
ception lay remote from every theme with which h'j
mind delighted to dally ; and far apart from all those
deeper thoughts on wiiich he mused and pondered, till
they assumed immortal embodiment in his own Hamlet.
And yet he had thought out, ar.d there sets forth with
profoundest significance, the essential distinctions and
attributes of humanity : —

' What i?. a man,
If his chief good ami niarkft of his time
He but to sleep and feed ? a beast, no more.
Sine he that made us with such large discourse.
Looking before and alter, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.'

He had not only sounded all the depths of the human
soul, but he had realised for himself the wholly diverse
motives and cravings of the mere animal mind. The
leading purpose of the following pages is, accordingly,
to shew that his genius had already created for us the
ideal of that imaginary intermediate being, between the
irue brute and man, which, if the new theory of descent
from crudest animal organisms be true, was our prede-

XII

PREFACE.

cesser and precursor in the inheritance of this world of
humanity. ^Ve have in ' The Tempest ' a being which is
' a beast, no more,' and yet is endowed with speech and
reason up to the highest ideal of the capacity of its lower
nature. A comparison between this Caliban of Shake-
speare's creation, and the so-called ' brute-progenitor of
man ' of our latest school of science, has proved replete
with interest and instruction to the writer's own mind ;
and the results are embodied in the following pages, for
such readers as may care to follow out the same study
for themselves.

The main theme is accompanied with a commentary
on two plays of Shakespeare, ' The Tempest,' and 'A
Midsummer Night's Dream,' chiefly appealed to in the
course of the preceding argument. Some of the conjec-
tural readings and other subjects touched on in this
supplement may be of interest to Shakespeare students.
Corrupt as the text of Shakespeare's plays undoubtedly
is, the author is far indeed from thinking that they stand
in need of any great amount of note or comment. The
loving student of his dramas, even with the most im-
perfect text, learns to enter so thoroughly into their
spirit and the personality of their characters, that he is
scarcely conscious of obscurity. He catches, as it were,
the sense of the whole ; and in many a controverted
passage, has never thought of obscurity, or felt a'ly
difficulty in enjoying it, till he has turned to the com-
mentators ind learns how sorely they have been per-
plexing tiiem.selves over its riddles. ,-

^#.

PREFACE.

Yet commentators have done good service in this, if
in no other respect. They have led to the dihgent study
of Shakespeare, even if it were at times only 'of envy
and strife.' But for the well-timed, though indiscri-
minate censures of Jeremy Collier, in his famous ' Short
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage,' published in 1698, and the controversies which
they provoked, the study of Shakespeare, on which his
true appreciation depended, might have been long de-
layed. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, in his 'Disquisition on
Shakespeare's Tempest,' wonders ' that so much respect
has not been paid to Dryden as to find a place in the
prolegomena of this play for the portion of the prologue
to his own and D'Avenant's transversion of it, in which
he pays so fine a compliment to Shakespeare.' But no
one who has any regard for the fair fame of Dryden will
seek to recall, in association with the name of Shake-
speare, the authorship of a 'transversion' which is with-
out exception the most contemptible evidence of the
utter incapacity of the Restoration era to comprehend
Shakespeare. It is not as a dramatist that Dryden takes
rank among England's poets ; and least of all would it
be a tribute of respect to his memory to revive a prologue
appended to one of the most chaste of all the great
master's creations, in which the later poet descends to a
grossness only too characteristic of the audience for
which Miranda and Caliban had to be despoiled of that
on which the innocence of the one, and the simple
naturalness of the other, mainly depend. If th? name

xiv

PREFACE.

of the great satirist to whom we owe the ' Absolom and
Achitophel ' is to be associated with Shakespeare's, it
can be done with a better grace, where he writes to
Sir Godfrey Kneller in acknowledgement, as is beheved,
of a copy of the Chandos portrait : —

'Shakespeare, tliy j;ift, I place liefoie my si{jht ;
\\ ilh awe I ask his blessing ere I write,
With leveieiice look on his majestic lace ;
I'roiul to he less, but of his god-like lace.'

It was not till the eighteenth century that Nicholas
Rowe, the first textual critic of the Shakespearean
drama, appeared ; and but for the bitter wars of Pope
and the dunces, — with Warburton, Johnson, Steevens,
Malone, and all the learned brood of commentators
following,— Shakespeare might have long been left to
the mercy of such playwrights as D'Avenant and
Dryden in the seventeenth, and Garrick and Gibber in
the eighteenth century. Yet let it never be thought, as
has too frequently been assumed, that Shakespeare is
only now for the first time adequately appreciated ; or,
as others even more grossly afiirm, that it was not till
German critics had revealed his power, that English
readers learned how great a poet their own Shakespeare
is. However notorious the failure of his friends and
literary executors, Heminge and Condell, may have
been as editors, — and had they executed their task in
the way it was in their power to have done, with ori-
ginal manuscripts, stage copies, the memories of living
actors, and the texts of earlier quartos, to appeal to.

PREFACE.

the race of commentators would have had no pretext
for textual recension ;— yet in high estimation of their
author's works, it is not easy for any later critic to
■surpass them. There, too, in the same folio, where
their appreciative preface proves that Shakespeare was
a true hero even to his fellow players, surly Ren Jonson,
forgecting all his old irascibilities, writes of his 'star
of poets ' —

' Sou! of the atje,
'llic applause ! delight ! the \\ oiuler of the staj;e !
My Shakespeare.'

Another contemporary, Leonard Digges,'in laudatory
verses of inferior power, but no less sincerity, prefixed
to a spurious edition of Shakespeare's poems published
in 1640, bears witness to the delight with which his
plays were welcomed before all others. His 'Ca.'sar'
could ravish the audience, wluyi they would not brook
Jonson's tedious ' Catiline.' His Othello and Falstaff, his
Beatrice, Benedick, and ' Malvolio, that cross -gar ter'd
gull,' would crow^d cock-pit, galleries, and boxes, till
scarce standing-room remained ; when even the choicest
of Ben Jonson's plays, 'The Fox and subtil Alchymist,'
could only at long intervals command their merited ova-
tion ; and so he concludes with the comparison of 'his
wit-fraught book ' to old coined gold, which by virtue
of its innate worth will pass current to succeeding ages.
Shakespeare's writings are indeed a mine of wealth, from
which the more they are studied the less it will su'rprise
us to draw forth treasures new and old ; and here, in his

xvi

PREFACE,

Calibaii, we recover a piece of 'old coin'd gold,' with
its Elizabethan mint-mark, but with a value for us such
as Shakespeare himself was unconscious of: like some
rarest numismatic gem, whose worth in the artistic beauty
of its die, far exceeds all its weight of sterling gold.

- -

UMVKKSnV COI.LEGK, I'OKONTO,
July 3, 1872.

CHAPTER I.

•; fh»

IN THE BEGINNING.

'We do but learn to-day what our belter-advanced judgments will
unteach us to-morrow; and Aristotle doth but instruct us, as Plato
did him : that is, to confute himseU.'—Religio Medici.

T N the ' Medley' of the Poet-Laureat, when the tale
J- of the Princes? is closed, with its mock-heroics, its

bantering burlesque, and its real earnestness, and the

little feud begins

'Betwixt the mockers and the realists,'

Lilia joins entirely with the latter. ' The sequel of the
tale had touched her,' she sate absorbed, perplexed in
thought, till

•Last she fix't
A showery glance upon her aunt, and said.
You— tell us what we are; who might have told.
For she was cramm'd with theories out of books ; '

but that the crowd, who had been making a sport of
scienvc, were swarming at the sunset to take leave;
and ere all was quiet again, the stillness gave its fitter
response to the question, unanswerable by 'theories out
of books.'

'So they sat,
But spoke not, rapt in nameless reverie.
Perchance upon the future man; the walls
Blacken'd about us, bats wheel'd, and owls whoop'd,
And gradually the powers of the night,
That range above the region of the wind.
Deepening the courts of twilight, broke them up
Through.all the silent spaces of the worlds, ' — , -

Beyond all thought, into the Heaven of heavens.'

/?•

IN THE BEGINNING.

But this question, ' Whence, and what are we ?' is not
to be repressed, cither by shouting crowds or by brood-
ing silences. The activity of the rersoning mind within
us is in no respect more manifest than in the irrepressible
inquiry into our own origin and that of the universe of
which we form a part. Every philosophy and every
faith undertakes some solution of the problem ; and
childlike as are the fables of primitive cosmogonists,
they all concur in recognising the evidence of design,
and so the necessity of a preexistent designer. The
eternity of matter has indeed had its advocates, as in
the philosophy of Democritus ; but matter was with
him no more than the formless void that preceded
creation. Time began when the universe was called
into being ; and its evolution out of chaos was in
accordance with a purposed plan, and the work of a
presiding will.

The order of the universe, as thus recognised, is first
a supreme infinite intelligence, then lesser finite intel-
ligences. But the gulf which lies between the finite
and the infinite is very partially diminished to us by
any conception we may form of highest finite in-
telligences, such as antique poetry and mythology
impersonated in a multitude of fanciful idealisms ; and
which to our own minds are acceptably presented as
ministering spirits, symbolised by indestructible fire :
beings in whom the intellectual element predominates,
and to whom is committed the ministration of the
supreme, intelligent, divine will. With such spiritual
essences science may reasonably disclaim counsel, as
with things lying wholly beyond its province. But
man, too, is an intelligent being, in some by no means
obscure sense made, as such, in the image of God.
It is indeed well to avoid as far as possible, in scientific

/.V THE BEGINNING.

discussion, the use of terms which have been appro-
priated by the theologian. But the human clement,
which Shakespeare calls ' God-like reason,' however we
may designate it, cannot be ignored ; though by some
modern lines of reasoning it is made to assume a very
materialistic origin. From very early times of philo-
sophical speculation, mind and matter have marshalled
their rival champions to tue field. As Byron jestingly
puts It: when Berkeley and his followers have said there
IS no matter, the profane realist has responded, it is
no matter what they say ! But the rival creeds are not
to be so fused. The feud between the idealists and
realists, the metaphysicians and the naturalists, is as
far as ever from being settled ; nor can science limit
Its bounds within any absolute materialism. As soon
as we take up the question of the origin and descent
of man we are compelled to deal with the spiritual no
less than the material element of his being, whatever
theories we may be tempted to form in accounting for
the origin of either.

In attempting to follow up the track of time through
the field of space, to that point when the universe, which
was not always there, began to be, two contradictory
hypotheses seem to offer themselves to the theorist
The eternity of matter may be assumed, with its
imagined elements in incoherent chaos, awaiting the
evolution of law and the beginning of organisation.
But out of this can come no directing or informing
will. It may seem but a step beyond this, but it is
a very long one, to start as Lady Psyche does, in her
introductory harangue to the fair undergraduates of the
university of the future :— -

., 'This world was once a fluid haze of light,

1 ^ "^'^^ toward the centre set the starry tides,'

~ " B 2

IN THE BEGINNING.

And eddied into suns, that, wheeling, cast
The planets ; then the monster, then the man :
Tattoo'd or woadcd, winter-clad in skins,
Raw from the prime.'

On the other hand, if the ancient maxim holds good,
that nothing can come out of nothing, it seems not less
but more scientific to start with the preoccupation of
the mighty void with the Eternal Mind. The con-
ception of such a Supreme Divine Intelligence seems
to commend itself to finite reason. It is easier to con-
ceive of the eternity of God than of His coming into
being. But if ' first mind, then matter,' be thus the
order of the universe, how are we to reconcile with it
the inductions of modern science, in such a total reversal
of this order in the process of creation of mind as is
implied in the development of the intellectual, moral,
and spiritual elements of man, through the same natural
selection by which his physical evolution is traced, step
by step, from the very lowest organic forms ?

The contrast which this hypothesis presents to older
theories of evolution, is nowhere better shown than in
the musings of the old sage of Norwich. In his ' Religio
Medici ' he deals, after his own quaint fashion, wiih the
oracles of antiquity, the supernatural of popular belief,
and the spiritual beings set forth in revelation. For
angelic natures he entertains a reverent regard undreamt
of in our age of positivisms and spiritualisms. He
doubts not that * those noble essences in heaven bear a
friendly regard unto their fellow-natures on earth ; ' and
therefore he believes that ' those many prodigies and
ominous prognostics which forerun the ruin of states,
princes, and private persons, are the charitable pre-
monitions of good angels.' It was due, no doubt, to such
calm philosophisings, that, in the very crisis of England's
and Charles the First's fate, he left the state and its

•

i.!

„__^.^ i

LV THE BEGINNING,

prince to the charity of such good angels, and busied
himself with his ' Pscudodoxia Epidf^mica ' or inquiries
into many commonly presumed truths, a id vulgar and
common errors. But having in this tranquil fashion
mused on the character and functions of angelic essences,
he passes to a refinement of the Platonic idea of ' an
universal and common spirit to the whole world,' the
Divine Source by whose almighty fiat the void was filled,
the darkness made light, and the light responded to by
a world of life. The quaint medicist then refers anew
to the angelic beings who owe their existence to the
same divine source, as certainly the masterpieces of the
Creator, the flower, or perfect bloom of 'what we are
but in hopes and probability ; for,' he adds, * we are
only that amphibious piece between corporal and
spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two
together, and makes good the method of God and
nature, that jumps not from extremes, but unites the
incompatible distances by some middle and participating
natures.'

The mystical fancies of the old physician reflect ideas
of an elder time, when faith had in it much of refined
simplicity and somewhat also of credulity ; and in which
genius dealt reverently yet fearlessly with many pro-
blems that anew invite our solution. Sir Thomas Browne
is as one born out of due time. He presents in unique
combination some of the most characteristic features of
the previous age : the age of Camden, Hooker, and
Donne ; of Bacon and Hobbes ; of Spenser, Sidney,
Lilly and Shakespeare. He is especially noticeable for
a learned conceit in his choice of words, and a quaintness
of phrase, such as Lilly had commended, and Shake-
speare ridiculed, even while turning it to account. But
still more does he link the age that preceded with the

•

IN THE BEGINNING.

one to which, in point of time, he belonged, by the
singular interblcnding of scepticism with a devout cre-
dulity : as where he declines to dispute the question
as to whether Eve was formed out of the left side of
Adam; or whether 'Adam was an hermaphrodite, as
the Rabbins contend upon the letter of the text, because
it is contrary to reason that there should be an her-
maphrodite before there was a woman.' Li this and
like manner he glances in inconsequential fashion at
thoughts which arc now presented to all n\inds in
clearest definition : accepting without difficulty what
no one will now credit, and rejecting unhesitatingly
what is now assumed as indisputable.

It was a transitional age, in which liberty was running
into licence, and nonconformity was persecuted rather
because its austerity offended the licentiousness of the
times, than that its creed ran counter io any recognisable
belief of the new era. The nonconformity which re-
ceives least toleration in our own day lies under the ban
of science far more than of theology. The Church has
grown so broad, that it becomes a puzzle to define what
might constitute heresy, or may not prove to be or-
thodoxy within its pale. But outside of its consecrated
bounds science has established its accredited beliefs,
as by a new Council of Nice ; and woe to the heretic
who ventures to question its dogmas. Its new hypotheses
are pronounced by most of its exponents to be infinitely
probable, and by many of them to be absolutely demon-
strated. With a generous denouncement of all intoler-
ance, the modern evolutionist presents his axioms to
the questioner, and passes on. Infallibility has deserted
the chair of St. Peter, and finds itself at home on a
new throne. It is perilous to mediate in the inquiries
which now occupy a foremost place in deduction, in-

IN THE BEGINNING.

duction, and scientific research. Tlicrc arc indeed
among the leaders of thought, men of calm judicial
sobriety, whose decisions are presented in so attractive
a form as to in\ le from the thoughtful mind the most
careful examination before thej' are rejected. Ikit it
is otherwise with the crowd of followers, who have been
dazzled by the novelty of the new theory of evolution,
and are animated with all the zeal of young converts.
We own to being charmed with the theory of the origin
of species, to having recognised in it the key to a
thousand difficulties in natural history ; but all is vain,
unless the whole hypothesis of the descent of man, the
evolution of mind, and every step in the pedigree by
which he is traced back to the remotest of his new-
found ancestry, be accepted as indisputable fact.

In such a stage of argument it is advantageous to be
able to appeal on any point to an impartial umpire ;
and it may prove of value to compare the poetical
imaginings of an age rich in genius of the highest order
with the matter-of-fact realism of our own day. It
suited the quaint philosophic mysticism of Sir Thomas
Browne to conceive of man as the intermediate link
between spiritual essences and mere animal life ; but
M. Louis Figuier puts forth, in his ' Day after Death,'
with all the gravity of a pure induction of science, the
latest scheme of psy^ liical evolution, in which he traces
a refining and sublimated humanity from planet to
planet in ever-renewing resurrection, until, freed from
its last earthly taint in the final solar abode of perfected
souls, it shall there 'lie immortal in the arms of fire.'
This demonstration of *our future life according to
science,' is neither offered to us as religious musings,
like those of Sir Thomas Browne ; nor as the sport of
scientific fancy, such as the dying philosopher. Sir

IN THE BFniNNING.

Humphrey Davy, wrought into the ingenious day-
dream which beguiled his last hours. The Frenchman
belongs to a scientific age; writes in an era of revolution,
in which many old things are passing away ; imagines
himself strictly inductive ; and publishes to the world
his fanciful speculations on a whole cycle of evolutions,
as a new gospel : the latest revelation of science and
the most comprehensive scheme of future development.
It has one special use at least, in which it is, so far,
a counterpart to Sir Humphrey Davy's ' Last Days
of a Philosopher.' It suffices to illustrate the barrenness
of the most ambitious fancy, with all the aids that
science can command, in every effort to realise that
other life, which ' it hath not entered into the heart
of man to conceive.'

But what imagination utterly fails to do as an in-
duction based on supposed scientific foundations, the
creative fancy of the true poet, working within its own
legitimate sphere, has accomplished to better purpose.
Not, indeed, that the unseen world, and the spiritual life
beyond the grave, are any nearer to the gifted poet
than to the humblest believer to whom the realities of
that higher state of existence are objects of faith : but
in those stages of real or hypothetical evolution, and the
transitional states of being which their assumption I.i-
volves, fancy has to play its part under whatever severe
restraints of scientific judgment. The comprehensive
faith which his novel doctrines involve, makes ever new
demands on the cultivated imaginings of the man of
science ; and it requires a mind of rare balance to pre-
serve the fancy in due subordination to the actual de-
monstrations of scientific truth. But if it were possible
to free the imagination from the promptings, alike of
seductive hypotheses and of the severer inductions of

IN THE BEGINNING.

science, and so have its own realisations of the possible
and the probable to compare with those assumed actual
anthropomorphic beings of a remote past with which
man is now affirmed to have such intimate genealogical
relations, the result v/ould be one to be welcomed by
every lover of truth. We should then be able to place
alongside of such creations of a well-regulated fancy, the
wholly independent deductions of scientific speculation
and research : whereas now the fancy of the evolu-
tionist is subject to all the dictations of a preconceived
theory; and he realises for himself, as an undoubted link
in the pedigree of humanity, such a being as seems
wholly inconceivable to another class of cultivated
minds. To the one, this imaginary being, ' the progeni-
tor of man,' seems as monstrous as the centaurs with
which the art of Phidias enriched the metopes of the
Parthenon ; to the other, every doubt, not merely of its
possible, but of its actual existence, appears the mere
offspring of prejudice.

Happily for the impartial inquirer, such an unbiassed
conception of the intermediate being, lower than man, as
man is ' a little lower than the angels,' is no vain dream
of modern doubt. The not wholly irrational brute, the
animal approximating in form and attributes as nearly
to man as the lower animal may be supposed to do
while still remaining a brute, has actually been con-
ceived for us with all the perfection of an art more real
and suggestive than that of the chisel of Phidias, in one
of the most original creations of the Shakespearean
drama.

The world has known no age of bolder inquiry, or
freer liberty of thought, than the sixteenth century.
The men of that grand era knew both how to question
and how to believe, and were able to give a reason for

IN THE BEGINNING.

the faith that was in them. This manly faith, no less
than the vigorous freedom of intellect of that age, is
reflected in the pages of Spenser and Shakespeare, even
more than in many of the theological writings of the
time. With the seventeenth century a change began.
Two of the most independent thinkers that have ap-
peared in modern Europe, Bacon and Hobbes, entered
on their labours, and gave a new bias to thought and
reasoning. The one undertook an analytical classifica-
tion of human knowledge, and aimed at supplementing
the ancient or Aristotelian logic in such a way as to
check the reasoner from making undue deductions from
the premises before him. The Baconian method may
not suffice as a fitting instrument for all the ample de-
mands of modern science; but it never was more need-
ful than now to require with strictest severity that the
inferences we magnify into demonstrations shall be fully
sustained by the premises on which they are founded.
The other, Hobbes, with close and consistent reasoning,
took up the department of mental philosophy, and,
amid many ethical theories only too consistent with
modern ideas of the evolution of mind, furnished con-
tributions to the science of m^'ntal philosophy, the full
value of which was not perceived by his own age. But
he was an incomplete moralist. His utilitarian theories
were based on a standard far below that of the Eliza-
bethan age. He belonged unmistakably, in his whole
reasonings as a moralist, to the era of decline. His
writings, as well as those of Bacon, abound with reflex
characteristics of that elder time ; but they no less
clearly indicate that its earnestness had passed away.
Yet its influence long survived, and it is even more
curious to recognise the same faith and Puritan theology
of the sixteenth century reflected in the satires of

IN THE BEGINNING.

Drydcn, than in the ethics of Hobbes, or the quaint
musings of Sir Thomas Browne.

' That we are the breath and simiHtude of God,' writes
the author of ' Religio Medici,' ' it is indisputable, and
upon record of Holy Scripture ; but to call ourselves a
microcosm, or little world, I thought it only a pleasant
trope of rhetoric, till my near judgment and second
thoughts told me there was a real truth therein. For
first, we are a rude mass, and in the rank of creatures
which only are, and have a dull kind of beinq- not yet
privileged with life, or preferred to sense or reason ; next
we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of
men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one
mysterious nature those five hind of existences, v/hich
comprehend the creatures not only of the world, but of
the universe.' Here we have unmistakable glimmerings
of Lamarckian and other theories of metamorphosis,
evolution, and progression.

But long before the author of the ' Religio Medici ' had
penned his ingenious musings on the development of the
human microcosm, Shakespeare had presented, in the
clear mirror of his matchless realisations alike of the
natural and supernatural, the vivid conception of 'that
amphibious piece between corporal and spiritual essence,'
by which, a'".cording to modern hypothesis, the human
mind is conjoined in nature and origin with the very
lowest forms of vital organism. The greatest of poets,
who seems to grow ever more wise and more true as
growing wisdom helps new generations to appreciate his
worth, has thus left for us materials not without their
value in discussing, even prosaically and literally, the
imaginary perfectibility of the irrational brute; the
imaginable degradation of rational man. Since Shake-
speare's day a school of didactic poets has merged into

IN THE BEGINNING.

M ■

a philosophical and metaphysical one ; and the most
objective poet of this metaphysical school has, in his
* Caliban upon Setebos ; or, Natural Theology in the
Island,' dealt with a new ideal of the same intermediate
being, shaped according to the beliefs and fancies of
later generations.

Those realisations of the same rational brute, in its
aboriginal habitat, in contact with the informing intelli-
gence of a higher nature, and in conflict with the doubts
which appear as the natural twin of new-born reason :
present us with conceptions, by two widely differing
minds, responding to the influences of eras no less dis-
similar. The object aimed at in the following chapters
is to place the conceptions of modern science in relation
to the assumed brute progenitor of man, alongside of
those imaginative picturings, and of the whole world of
fancy and superstition pertaining to that elder time ;
while also, the literary excellences, and the textual diffi-
culties of the two dramas of Shakespeare chiefly appealed
to in illustration of the scientific element of inquiry, are
made the subjects of careful study.

irr^rT'iT-Baaia-

CHAPTER II.

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

' What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
If thou remember"st aught ere thou earnest here,
How thou earnest here thou mayst.' — The Tempest.

IT is a pleasant fancy, due to the poet Campbell, that
' The Tempest ' of Shakespeare, which stands first in
the earliest collected edition of his dramas, has a special
sacredness, as in reality the last of the great magician's
works ; and that in the sage Prospero, holding nature in
all her most mysterious attributes subject to his will,
yet on the very eve of yielding up this sway, the poet
unconsciously pictured himself In the plenitude of
his power, with all his wondrous genius at command, he
wrought this exquisite work of art ; and that done, the
wizard staff was broken, and silence displaced the
heavenly music it had wrought. It is not of moment
for our purposed criticism that this should be proved.
It suffices that the work in question is universally ac-
knowledged as one peculiarly inspired with the poetry
of nature and the creative power of genius. The scene
of this remarkable drama is laid on a nameless island ;
the actors are beings of air and of earth ; but pre-
eminently for us, the island has a being of its own,
native-born, its sole aboriginal inhabitant :—

•Then was this island — ^ -- „_^
Save for the son that she did litter here,

A freckled whelp, hag-bom, — not honour'd with r -~^

A human shape." .

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

The poor monster — sole lord of his nameless island in
an unknown sea,— has excited mingled feelings of
wonder, admiration, and disgust. But the latter feeling
must be transient with all but the superficial student.
With truer appreciation, Franz Horn has said : ' In spite
of his imperfect, brutish, half-human nature, Caliban is
something marvellously exciting, and as pretender to
the sovereignly of the island ridiculously sublime. He
is inimitable as a creation of the most powerful poetic
fancy ; and the longer the character is studied the more
marvellous does it appear.' It is by reason of this im-
perfect, brutish, half-human nature, that Caliban anew
invites our study, in relation to disclosures of science
undreamt of in that age which witnessed his marvellous
birth.

The idea of beings, monstrous and brutal in every
physical characteristic, and yet in some not clearly
defined sense human, as the inhabitants of strange
lands, was familiar not only in Shakespeare's day but
long before. Medieval chroniclers descrSe the Huns
who ravaged Germany, Italy, and France in the ninth
and tenth centuries, as hideous, boar-tusked, child-
devouring ogres ; and after somewhat the same type,
Marco Polo represents the Andaman Islanders as 'a
most brutish, savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth
resembling those of the canine species : ' cruel cannibals
who ate human flesh raw, and devoured every one on
whom they could lay their hands. Yet after all, much
of this was only an exaggeration of the actual savage,
such as he is to be met with even in our own day.

An older English writer, the famous traveller, Sir
John Mandeville, who commenced his wanderings in
1322, tells how he had 'ben long tyme over the see,
and seyn and gon thorgh manye dyverse londes, and

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

»S

many provynces and kyngdotnes and iles : where
dwellcn many dyverse folk, and of dyverse maneres and
lawes, and of dyverse schappes of men ; of whiche I shalle
speke more pleynly hereafter.' And so he accordingly
does: telling, for example, of 'the land of Bacharie, where
be full evil folk and full cruel. In that country been
many Ipotaynes, that dwell sometimes in the water
and sometimes on the land : half-man and half-horse,
and they eat men when they may take them.' Besides
these, he also describes the griffons of the same country,
half-eagle, half-lion, but so large that they carry off a
horse or couple of oxen to their nest ; in proof of which
Mandeville tells us, the griffon's talons are as big as
great oxen's horns, ' so that men maken cuppes of hem
to drynken of No doubt Milton had Mandeville's
griffon in view when he compared the fiend to this
monster, as he laboriously winged his way up from
the nethermost abyss of Hell.

Of the like travellers' tales of more modern date,
there will be occasion to speak by and by. The classi-
fication of men by the naturalists of Mandeville's and
Marco Polo's days, was into Christians and infidels ; and
it seemed then not only natural, but most logical, to
conceive of the latter as of betusked ogres, hippo-
centaurs, or any other monstrous half-brutish and wholly
devilish humanity. But a different ideal of imperfect
transitional human beings originated at a later date in
the very natural exaggerations of gorilla, chimpanzee,
or orang, as first seen or reported of in their native
haunts.

If * The Tempest ' was indeed the latest production of
Shakespeare's pen, then the date of that most amusing
old book of travels, ' Purchas his Pilgrimage,' closely
corresponds in point of time with its appearance on the

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

English stage. Published in 1613, that is within less
than three years before Shakespeare's death, its author
embodies among its miscellaneous contents, the story
of his friend, Andrew Battle, who while a serjeant in the
service of the Portugese, in the kingdom . of Congo, on
quarrelling with his masters fled to the woods, where he
lived eight or nine months ; and there he saw ' a kinde
of great apes, if they might be so termed, of the height
of a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes,
with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise
altogether like men and women in their whole bodily
shape.' At a later date Purchas described more
minutely the pongo, a huge brute-man, sleeping in the
trees, building a roof to shelter himself from the rain,
and living wholly on fruits and nuts. 'They cannot
speake,' he says, ' and have no understanding more than
a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travail
in the woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night ;
and in the morning, when they are gone, the pongoes
will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out ; for
they have no understanding to lay the wood together.'

This may suffice to illustrate the ' wild men ' who,
with greater or less exaggeration, figure in the traveller's
tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They
attract us now with a fresh interest, when we are being
taught by novel inductions of science to look, in recent
or tertiary life, for some such link between the lowest
type of savage man and the highest of the anthro-
pomorpha. In truth we have the best scientific authority
for affirming that the differences between man and the
chimpanzee, according to all recognised physical tests,
are much less than those which separate that anthropoid
ape from lower quadrumana. So much less indeed are
at, comt

they,

ipared

THE CAUnAN OF EVOLUTION.

brain, the result may well raise a doubt as to the fitness
of a test which admits of such close affinities physically,
and such enormous diversities morally and intellectually.
If, however, man is but this ' quintessence of dust,' ' the
paragon of animals,' estimable in utmost requisite com-
prehensibility by the test of physical structure, then it is
well that all should learn to

' Admire such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And show a Newton as we show an ape.'

Linn.Tus indeed, with intuitive foresight anticipating
modern naturalists, long hesitated whether to rank the
chimpanzee as a second species of the genus Homo, or as
first among apes. But the Swedish naturalist could
not speak from personal observation; and indeed placed
too implicit faith in the exaggerated, if not wholly
fabulous accounts of a female animal of human propor-
tions and pleasing features, but covered with hair, the
Orang ontatig, sive Homo Sylvcstris, as furnished by
Bontius and later writers. But there is a long step
between the classificatory idea of Linnaeus and the
modern doctrine of the Descent of Man. To recognise
that man and the ape are both animals, and so to
determine their classification in the same animal king-
dom solely by means of physical tests on which the
whole system is based, is one thing; to assume that
man is but the latest phase of development in a pro-
gressive scale of evolution, of which the ape is an earlier
stage, is the other and more startling afllirmation which
is permeating the minds of the present generation of
thinkers, and revolutionising the science of the nine-
teenth century.

With cautious reticence, the author of ' The Origin of
Species by means of Natural Selection ' continued to

7 HE CALJJJAN OF EVOLUTION.

accumulate evidence as to the origin or descent of man,
while freely communicating to the world all other proofs
leading up, as he conceives, to that end. lie not only
hesitated to startle and prejudice his readers against
the novel system as a whole, by publishing what
nevertheless seemed to him the inevitable deduction
from his general views, but he had determined to
withhold that crowning result of his resea/ch. Yet as
he had indicated in no obscure fashion, in his earlier
work, that man must be included with all other beings
in the new theory of the origin of species f no wonder
that his disciples hastened to break through prudential
restraints, and proclaim in undisguised simplicity the
doctrine of affinities and genealogy, by which we are
taught to conceive of a remote marine group of her-
maphrodites diverging into two great branches, the one
in retrograde descent producing the present class of
Ascidians, hardly recognisable as animals ; the other
giving birth to the vertebrata, and so to man himself.

Of the latest ramifications in this genealogical tree,
its discoverer tells us, ' there can hardly be a doubt
that man, is an offshoot from the old-world simian
stem ; and that, under a genealogical point of view, he
must be classed with the catarhine division,' or old-
world monkeys, with their more human-like nostrils,
dentition, and other minor characteristics. ' If,' con-
tinues Mr. Darwin, 'the anthropomorphous apes be
admitted to form a natural sub-group, then as man
agrees with them, not only in all those characters which
he possesses in common with the whole catarhine group,
but in other peculiar characters, such as the absence of
a tail, and of callosities, and in general appearance, we
may infer that some ancient member of the anthropo-
morphous sub-group gave birth to man.' And he adds

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

«9

thus further : ' No doubt man, in comparison with most
of his allies, has underj^one an extraordinary amount of
modification, chiefly in consequence of his greatly-
developed brain and erect position : nevertheless, we
should bear in mind that he is but one of several excep-
tional forms of primates.'

The extremely remote progenitor of man was thus a
catarhine monkey, probably dwelling in those African
regions which wen^ formerly inhabited by extinct apes
closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee. As, how-
ever, the Dryopithecus of Lartct, an ape nearly as large
as a man, and closely allied to the anthropomorphous
Hylobates, existed in Europe during the Upper Miocene
period, when oceans of the present time were solid land,
and continents of our present globe were buried below
long-extinct oceans, we can very vaguely surmise as to
the locality which, under the assumed process of evo-
lution, gave birth to our progenitor.

But while the wanderings of the world's gray fathers
in such inconceivably remote and dark ages are hard to
trace, their forms reveal themselves with no vague
uncertainty to the scientific seer. ' The early progeni-
tors of man,' says Mr. Darwin, 'were no doubt once
covered with hair, both sexes having beards : their ears
were pointed and capable of movement, and their bodies
were provided with a tail having the proper muscles.'
They had numerous other characteristics normally
present in living quadrumana, but now not ordinarily to
be looked for in man. But of this also Mr. Darwin
speaks as beyond doubt, that our progenitors were
arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-
clad land ; and the males provided with great canine
teeth, which served as formidable weapons for assault
and defence.

c 2

THE C A Lin AN OF EVOLUTION.

The being which thus rises in clear vision to the
mind's eye as the product of this theory of evohition, is
not man, but only man's progenitor. Me is still irrational
and dumb, or at best only entering on the threshold of
that transitional stage of anthropomorphism which is to
transform him into the rational being endowed with
speech. To the author of ' The Descent of Man,' how-
ever, it does not appear altogether incredible that some
unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of
imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate
to his fellow-monkeys the nature of the expected danger;
and so, with forethought and reasoning thus fairly at
work, and even perhaps a benevolent regard for the
interests of his weaker and less-experienced fellow-
monkeys, — which would indicate something of a moral
sense already present,— the first step is taken in the
formation of a language for the coming man.

To all appearance, the further process in the assumed
descent — or, as we might more fitly call it here, the
ascent, — of man from the purely animal to the rational
and intellectual stage, is but a question of brain develop-
ment ; and this cerebral growth is the assigned source
of the manward progress : not a result of any functional
harmonising of mind and brain. Man as compared
with the anthrop'^morphous apes has ' undergone an
extraordinary amount of modification, chiefly in con-
sequence of his greatly developed brain! It is difficult
to dissociate from such an idea the further conclu-
sion, that reason and mind are no more than the
action of the enlarged brain ; yet this is not neces-
sarily implied. The mind must communicate with the
outer world by the senses ; and within those gateways
of knowledge must He a brain of adequate compass
to receive and turn to account the impressions con-

THE CAUnAN^ OF EVOLUTION.

veycd to it. The brain is certainly the organ of
reasoning, the vital instrument through which the
mind acts ; but it need not therefore be assumed that
brain and mind are one. The microcephalic idiot may
have dormant mental powers only requiring an ade-
quate organisation for rational activity. The imprisoned
soul may be only awaiting the emancipation of death
to enter upon its true life.

In the deductions based on comparative anatomy,
cerebral bulk and structure have necessarily played an
important part. The more carefully the human brain
has been compared with those of the anthropomorpha,
the tendency has been to diminish the distinctive
features, apart from absolute size. The brain of man,
in a healthy, normal state, ranges from one hundred
and fifteen to fifty-five cubic inches. The lowest of
these numbers is, therefore, the point of comparison
with the most highly developed brute. Midway be-
tween it and the highest cerebral development of the
latter, lies the intermediate, hypothetical ' man's pro-
genitor,' the Caliban of Science. In the gorilla, accord-
ing to the trustworthy authority of Professor Huxley, the
volume of brain rises to nearly thirty-five cubic inches;
the human brain at its lowest is fifty-five. Twenty
cubic inches, therefore, is the whole interval to be
bridged over. Yet narrow as it seems, on one side of
this gulf is the irrational ape, on the other side is man.

This brain-test has been made the subject of much
controversy and of very conflicting opinions. Pro-
fessor Owen sought to make it the basis of a system
of classification, in which, by means of cerebral charac-
teristics, he assigned to the genus Homo not merely a
distinct order, but a sub-class of the mammalia, to
which he gave the name Archencephala. But the

»3

THE CALWAM OF EVOLUTIO.V.

assumed differences, otherwise than in actual volume,
have been nearly all rejected by some of the highest
authorities in comparative anatomy% As to mere bulk,
the volrme of brain, of the gorilla, for example, must be
regarded relatively to the size of the animal ; but in all
most notable characteristics we have the authority of
Professor Huxley for asserting that ' the brain of man
differs far less from that of the chimpanzee than that of
the latter does from the pig's brain.'

The essential difference between man and the ape,
then, as tested by the brain, chiefly rests on superiority
in relative size ; and the process of transition in
this respect is mainly, if not entirely, one of growth.
But the most ancient hfman crania hitherto recovered,
such as that from the Engis Cave, near Liege, and
the most degraded types, approximating in any con-
siderable degree to an ape-like form, as the Neander-
thal skull, betray no corresponding diminution of cere-
bral mass. The latter is described by Mr. Busk as
' the most brutal of all known human skulls, resembling
those of the apes not only in the prodigious develop-
ment of the superciliary prominences, and the forward
extension of the orbits, but still more in the depressed
form of the brain-case, in the straightness of the squa-
mosal suture, and in the complete retreat of the occiput
forw^ard and upward, from the superior occipital ridges.'
This skull, however, has no such antiquity as can give it
any legitimate claim to rank as the transitional brute-
man ; while its cerebral capacity is estimated at seventy-
five cubic inches. So far, therefore, as the mass of brain
is concerned, it exceeds that of many living savages,
and of not a few Europeaiis. The fossil remains of man
hitherto recovered are assigned to no older deposits than
those of the Later \ ertiary, or the Quaternary period.

THE CALI/LiX OF EVOLUTION.

or contemporary with animals of the post-cjlacial epoch.
Remote as tliose are, accordini^ to all ordinary esti-
mates of the antiquity o^ man, their disclosures are ac-
knowledt^ed to lend little countenance to the doctrine
of progressive development from lower simian forms ;
and the evolutionist now relegates his hypothetical
evidence of man's brute progenitor to geological ages
even more removed from the glacial epoch than that
is from our own. Sir Charles Lyell has expressed his
belief in the probable recovery of human remains in
the Pliocene strata ; but there he pauses. In the Miocene
period, he conceives, ' had some other rational being
representing man then flourished, some signs of his exist-
ence could hardly have escaped unnoticed, in the shape of
implements of stone and metal, more frequent and more
durable than the osseous remains of any of the mam-
malia.' But Sir John Lubbock will by no means allow
the line tc be so drawn. ' If,' he says, ' man constitutes
a separate family of mammalia, as he does in the opinion
of the highest authorities, then, according to all pahi;on-
tological analogies, he must have had representatives in
Miocene times. We need not, however, expect to find
the proofs in Europe ; our nearest relatives in the
animal kingdom are confined to hot, almost tropical
climates, and it is in such countries that we must look
for tne earliest traces of the human race.' There, accord-
I'.igly, the expectant paheontologist anticipates the dis-
covery of the Caliban of evolution, whose fossil skeleton,
of strange unperfected humanity, with intermediate
cerebral development between ape and man, may yet
displace the Guadeloupe slab, and claim the place of
honour among the choicest treasures of the British

M USeU m . . -..-.-,.^.- . -j-~-~ —--r——~r^rjry;^.~^-T- — — ^^-~i.~

But the brain, to which we as definitely assign the

2 +

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

work of thinking and reasoning, as to the eye that of
seeing, and to the ear that of hearing — or, more strictly,
of conveying the impressions of sight and hearing to the
brain, and so to the mind, — seems to fail us as any guide
or k'^y to an evolutionary classification. When we turn
to .the variations in the lower forms of anim.al life, the
relative volume of brain furnishes no index of the enor-
mous contrast ultimately ascribed to its full develop-
ment. The brain of the orang and chimpanzee is about
twenty-six inches in volume, or half the minimum
size assigned to the normal human brain. That of the
gibbon and baboon is still less; while, on the other hanf'.
in the gorilla, as already shown, the volume of braiii
rises to nearly thirty-five cubic inches ; or, in other
words, between the brain of the orang or chimpanzee
and that of the gorilla there is nearly half the difference
by which, according to this cerebral test, the latter is
separated from man. The capacity of fifty-five cubic
inches as the lowest normal human brain is that assigned
by Professor Huxley, while, thirty-five cubic inches is the
volume of brain in the gorilla. In cranial characteristics,
as well as in dentition, and in the proportional size of
the arms, the chimpanzee is liker man than the gorilla ;
and in certain special cerebral details, and especially
in the form of the cerebral hemispheres, as well as in
other less important elements of structure, the orang
still more nearly resembles man. But in point of cere-
bral volume, the gorilla approaches him by nearly half
the difference between the two, as compared with that
which distinguishes it from the chimpanzee or orang.
Man thus stands in relation to the gorilla as fifty-five
to thirty-five. Between the brain of the gorilla and
that of tne chimpanzee or orang there is nearly half
this difference in its favour : thirty-five to twenty-six

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

^t*;

cubic inches. Yet we look in vain for corresponding traces
of augmented intelligence or approximation to reason.
But, as water at two hundred and twelve degrees sud-
denly passes beyond the boiling point into vapour : so
at some undetermined degree in this cerebral scale, be-
tween thirty-five and fifty-five, the point is reached at
which the irrational brute flashes into the living soul.

If the premises can be accepted, the results follow
by very simple evolution. Given the requisite brain-
development ; and, if mental power, reason, moral sense,
language, and all else that makes man man, are but pro-
ducts of the larger brain : then the process by which the
ape grew * unusually wise,' and the next step, and all
subsequent steps by which it passed into the so-called
' progenitor of man,' and so onward to man himself,
are conceivable. The mere fact indeed of being hairy,
having ears pointed and capable of motion, or even
being provided with a tail and every caudal muscle,
need no more conflict with the idea of a reasoning
reflecting being endowed with speech, than the flat-
tened nose, prognathous jaws, oblique pelvis, or any
other known approximation to types of degradation.

It is pleasant to associate the noble presence of
Shakespeare with his matchless drama ; yet physical
beauty is no needful complement of intellectual power.
Socrates was none the less fitted to be the master of
Plato, though his ungainly features and disproportioned
body suggested the ideal satyr, and made him the butt
of Aristophanes on the Athenian comic stage. But
the hairy covering, the prognathous jaws and formid-
able canine teeth, with all else that pertain to the
true brute, are no deformities so long as they are the
indices of functions essential to the well-being of the
animal. What we do recognise is, on the one hand.

THE C A Lin AN OF EVOLUTION.

the irrational creature naturally provided with clothing,
— hairy, woolly, feathery, or the like, — armed and fur-
nished in its own structure with every needful tool ;
and endowed with the requisite weaving, cell-making,
mining, nest-building instincts, independent of all in-
struction, experience, or accumulated knowledge. On
the other hand is Man, naked, unarmed, unprovided
with tools, naturally the most helpless, defenceless of
animals ; but, by means of his reason, clothing, arming,
housing himself, and assuming the mastery over the
whole irrational creation, as well as over inanimate
nature. With the aid of fire he can adapt not only
the products but the climates of the most widely
severed latitudes to his requirements. He cooks, and
the ample range of animal and vegetable life in every
climate yields him wholesome nutriment. Wood, bone,
flint, shells, stone, and at length the native and wrought
metals, arm him, furnish him with tools, — with steam-
ships, railroads, telegraphic cables. He is lord of all
this nether world.

Is this being really no more than the latest de-
velopment of the other } Is there not still a missing
link, forged though it has seemed to be by the
creative fancy of the scientific speculator .'' It is not
merely that intermediate transitional forms are wanting :
the far greater difficulty remains, by any legitimate
process of induction to realise that evolution which
consistently links by natural gradation the brute in
absolute subjection to the laws of matter, and the
rational being ruling over animate and inanimate
nature by force of intellect. Very true it may be, as
Mr. Darwin says, that ' if man had not been his own
classifier, he would never have thought of founding a
separate order for his own reception.' That is to say,

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

the irrational classifier would necessarily have excluded
the unknown element of reason as a basis of classifi-
cation. But does this not amount to the very fact
that man does stand apart, as the only reasoning,
intelligent, classifying animal ? He is conscious of an
element peculiar to himself, distinguishing him, not
in degree, but radically, from the very wisest of apes.
The reasoning faculty — whether it be the mere large
brain-power, or something as essentially distinct as that
which 'smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its
point,' — lies beyond the ken of any such anthropoid
classifier. Yet reason may, on that very account, be
a more distinctive element than hand, foot, pelvis,
vertebrre, brain, or any other structural characteristic.

As the metaphysician appears at times to become
sceptical as to the very existence of matter, so a too
exclusive devotion to physical science is apt even more
to remove the metaphysical and psychical beyond all
practical recognition in the reasonings of the physicist.
Hence the spiritual element in man seems to dwindle
into insignificance in the argument of the evolution-
ists. There is an unconscious evasion of the real
difficulty in their conception of a transitional half-
brute, half-man ; an illusive literalness, like the fancy
of Milton, when from the Earth's fertile womb

'Now half appeared < .

r ■, . The tawny lion, pawing to get free ; r^

,• ., , i His hinder parts.'

The difficulty is not to conceive of the transitional
form, but of the transitional mind. After all has been
most strongly dwelt upon which seems to degrade the
brutified Australian Bushman, Andaman Islander, or
other lowest type of human savage, he is still human.
It can with no propriety be said of him that he

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

has only doubtfully attained to the rank of manhood.
The ape, caught young, may be taught some very
notable tricks. The young savage, whenever he has
been subjected to adequate training, has shown a fair
capacity, at the least, for such intellectual culture as
is familiar to the English peasant. The savage is in
no transitional stage. The mental faculties are dormant,
not undeveloped. The active energies of his mind are
expended in dealing with the exigencies of life. Take
the Patagonian, the Red Indian, or the Esquimaux :
his whole energies are exhausted in providing the
means of existence. If his exertions are remitted he
pays the forfeit with his life. So is it with the
Australian. Intellect is the means with which he
fights the battle of life. The ingenuity shown in all
needful arts is great : in his bags, baskets, nets for
fishing and bird-catching, his .spear and boomerang.
Nor is even his aesthetic faculty to be despised. The
ornamentation of his weapons is tasteful and elaborate,
while the carvings on rocks, of animate and inanimate
forms in considerable detail, are far from contemp-
tible. Moreover these latter are by no means mere
products of idle pastime. Like the corresponding
gravings of the American savage, they embody the
rudiments of written language, the first stage of that
ideography through which the hieroglyphics of Egypt
passed into the true phonetics of Phoenician and
Greek, Roman and English alphabets.

After all the minuteness of modern research, then,
into the degradation of the savage, he is still no less
man than ourselves. We are struck with wonder at
any manifestation of half-reasoning sagacity or inherited
instinctive ingenuity in the dog, the horse, the elephant,
or the ape, because we judge of it from the standard

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTIOiV.

»9

of an irrational brute. But the infant, even of the
savage, ere it has completed its third year, does daily
and hourly, without attracting notice, what surpasses
every marvel of the ' half-reasoning ' elephant or dog.
In truth, the difference between the Australian savage
and a Shakespeare or a Newton is trifling, compared
with the unbridged gulf which separates him from the
very wisest of dogs or apes.

So far then it would seem, that not one but many
links are missing between man and his nearest anthro-
poid fellow-creature. Moreover, the deduction is by no
means settled beyond all question which assumes the
Australian Bushman, or other savage, as the lowest, and
therefore the earliest existing type in an ascending
scale of humanity ; still less is it an indisputable
assumption that they furnish in any sense illustra-
tions of man in a state of nature. The gorilla or
other wild animal in his native arboreal retreat is
thoroughly natural and at home. He is there the
perfect gorilla. His long, black, glossy fur is in
beautiful condition. His whole physical state is one
of cleanly, healthful consistency with all the natural
functions of his being. He is incapable of moral
wrong ; and in every relationship that binds him to
his species he fulfils the duties of life unerringly.
• Our early semi-human progenitors,' says Darwin, * would
not have practised infanticide, for the instincts of the
lower animals are never so perverted as to lead them
regularly to destroy their own offspring.' Are we not
then guilty of gross injustice when we speak of the
savage as brutish? His is a degraded and abject
humanity the farthest removed from the brutes.
Man is most like the healthy well-conditioned wild
animal, when seen in a state of civilisation : well-

3«>

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

housed, cleanly, and in all virtuous obedience to the
laws of nature, alike personally and in every social
relation. It is not more reasonable to speak nf those
savages of civilisation, the city Arab or Bohemian, as
in a state of nature, than of the filthy, unnaturally
licentious, morally abject savage. If that is the state
of nature for the brute in which it is found perfect in
form, in fur, or plumage, fulfilling the ends of life in
healthful accordance with every natural instinct, then
savage man, regarded as an animal, is in no such state.
On the contrary, he exhibits just such an abnormal
deterioration from his true condition as is consistent
with the perverted free-will of the rational free agent
that he is. lie is controlled by motives and impulses
radically diverse from any brute instinct. This very
capacity for moral degradation is one of the distinc-
tions which separate man, by a no less impassable
barrier than his latent aptitude for highest intellectual
development, from all other living creatures. ' A
beast, that wants discourse of reason,' is Shakespeare's
idea of the inferior animal, when in his ' Hamlet ' he would
contrast it with the unnatural conduct of rational man.

If this view of the perfectly developed brute in a
state of nature, and of man in conditions which seem
no less natural to him as a being so diversely endowed,
be correct, then we start with a fallacy when we com-
pare degraded man with the matured lower animal.
The points of seeming resemblance have no relation as
links of a common descent. On the contrary, they
have converged from opposite directions, and deceive
us : just as the idiot, who is unquestionably a product of
degradation, might be mistaken for the manward stage
of progression of the ape. We have first to determine
what is the nature of man before we can say what is

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

.11

a state of nature for him. But is it not an assumption
of the major premiss to assert that he is but a deve-
loped brute, and therefore that which is a state of
nature for the one must be so for the other ?

On any theory of evolution which assumes the savage
to be the lowest surviving type of man as a link in the
progressive stages of development of the brute into a
rational being, the first manifestations of reason, while
they blunt the pure instincts, would seem to result in a
perverted moral sense, antagonistic to all the healthful
instincts of its nature. Instinct is a safe guide to the
brute, reason supplants it to the advantage of man ; but
how to conceive of a survival of the fittest among those
'semi-human progenitors' in the hybrid condition, with
passions emancipated from the restraint of half-obliterated
instincts, and uncontrolled by the glimmering reason, is
the difficult problem of the new science. We must look
elsewhere than in the kraal or lair of the Ausi ilian or
Borneo savage, if we would forge anew the missing link
between man and his nearest fellow-creatures : that
intermediate brute-man which, on any theory of evolu-
tion, must have actually existed in some early stage of
the world. We have to conceive, if we can, of a being
superior to the very wisest of our simian fellow-creatures
in every reasoning power short of rationality ; but in-
ferior to the most anthropoid ape in all those natural
provisions for covering, defence, and subsistence, which
are the substitutes for that reasoning foresight and
inherited knowledge on which the naked defenceless
savage relies. Why, on any theory of survival of the
fittest, of natural, or of sexual selection, we should find
the Fuegian or the Esquimaux naked descendants of
progenitors naturally clothed with fur, becomes all the
more incomprehensible if any significance is to be

.31

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

attached to the observation of A^assiz, that the boun-
daries of distinct species and genera of mammals on the
earth's surface coincide with the natural range of distinct
types of man. If so, we should expect to find arctic man
not less amply provided than the polar bear with a
natural covering so indispensable to his native habitat.

But, though the difficulty here suggested is one
which must have occurred to many minds, it is not
the half-human form of man's brute progenitor that
puzzles the imagination. Fancy has long familiarised
itself with sylvan fauns and satyrs, as with centaurs,
mermaids, werwolves, and the like intermediate beings.
It is the half-human intellect which is most difficult
to realise : not the dormant reasoning faculties of
the savage, but the undeveloped or partially developed
rationality of a being that has ceased to be a brute,
but has yet to become a man. Mr. Darwin, with
that candour which has won for him the confidence of
many a reluctant student, remarks that the difference of
man in respect to his mental power, from all other animals
' is enormous, even if we compare the mind of one of the
lowest savages, who has no words to express any number
higher than four, and who uses no abstract terms for the
commonest objects or affections, with that of the most
highly organised ape. The difference would, no doubt,
still remain immense, even if one of the higher apes had
been improved or civilised as much as a dog has been in
comparison with its parent form, the wolf or jackal.
The Fuegians rank among the lowest barbarians ; but I
was continually struck with surprise how closely the
three natives on board of H.M.S. "Beagle," who had
lived some years in England, and could talk a little
English, resembled us in disposition, and in most of our
mental faculties.' The same idea impressed myself

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

when camping out on the north shore of Lake Superior
with Red Indian guides, who had come from beyond the
Saskatchewan to trade their furs. The mental faculties
of the Red Indian savage are dormant, not absent. He
manifests, after some brief intercourse, a wonderful apti-
tude for conforming in many ways to his civilised asso-
ciates ; and much of the silent impassive stoicism of the
Indian disappears,— turns out, indeed, to be no ethnical
characteristic or native instinct, but an acquired habit.
He is, in truth, as inquisitive as a child.

Starting, then, from the assumed brute-progenitor of
man, we are to suppose, it may be presumed, that the
brain went on growing, and with it the various mental
faculties forming, until the transitional being acquired
craft enough to outmatch all the mere physical force or
instinctive wiles of its inferior fellow-creatures. But
simultaneously with this approximation to man in
cerebral development, we are also to assume that the
huge jaws and great canine teeth became reduced in
size, and all other brute-like attributes and powers de-
clined. The arboreal haunts of the frugivorous or car-
nivorous anthropoid were forsaken. The prehensile
powers of the foot were exchanged for the firmer tread
by means of which the weighty brain-mass is thence-
forth to rest on the summit of the upright spinal column.
He has learned to walk erect. His hands are thence-
forth free for all ingenious and artistic manipulation
which the growing brain may suggest ; but with increas-
ing delicacy of action and sense of touch, they lose in a
corresponding degree an excess of mere muscular power.
Reason is to be of more account than physical force.
Nor is it to be assumed that the evolution is even now
complete, or that man has attained to finality as such;
and so may hold himself ready for that next stage, or

.14

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

fifth order of existence, which, according to the author
of the ' Rehgio Medici,' is to make him superhuman :
a creature not of the world, but of tlic universe. Evolu-
tion is progressive as ever, though it moves in a new
direction. The brain is now to be brought into ever-
increasing activity, with corresponding developments,
until Shakespeares and Newtons shall be, not the ex-
ceptions, but the rule. This evolutionary being has
tlius, in a distant future, still higher destinies awaiting
him, as the summit of the organic scale ; yet he is to
bear to the last in his bodily frame the indelible stamp
of his lowly origin.

But in this process of exchanging native instincts and
weapons, strength of muscle and natural clothing, for
the compensating intellect, the transmuted bru<-o must
have reached a stage in which it was inferior in 'llect
to the very lowest existing savages, and in br. _ iOrce
to the lower animals. This is the being most difficult to
realise, or to find an Eden for him, where, under any
favouring circumstances, he could survive the latest
stages of his marvellous transformation. That ' gulf
bridged over by the sheltering aid of some mild insulated
region and every favouring circumstance for the matur-
ing and survival of a being dependent on such novel
conditions, we have man's progenitor fairly started on
his anthropomorphous course. With progressive cerebral
growth, and a corresponding development of mental
activity, a brain-power results capable of carrying on
continuous trains of thought, and so tracing results to
their causes. Hence experience, selfish caution, pruden-
tial motives, sympathetic feelings : until at length there
results the moral sense, a recognition of the distinction
between right and wrong, a possibility of conceiving of
moral responsibility, and so of God. The brute has
become man.

THE CALIUAN OF EVOLUTION.

:\h

To realise for ourselves this strangely-evolved being,
we have to think of something with greatly more of the
healthy natural instincts of animal life than pertain to
the degraded savage. Nevertheless the supreme difficul-
ties lie in the earlier stages, which, on this hypothesis,
are already past. Nature could now proceed freely with
that last stage, in which the transformed brute dispensed
with any remaining traces of natural clothing, nails or
claws, teeth, and other offensive or defensive weapons :
and so leave him to the novel resources, by means of
which he is to become the tool-making, fire-using, cook-
ing, clothing animal ; to make for himself houses, boats,
implements, weapons ; to wander abroad with new ca-
pacities for adapting hiiv elf to all climates; until, from
being the most helplc , and limited in range of the
higher animals, he assumes his rightful dominion over
all : the one cosmopolitan to whom every living thing is
subject.

Had such an hypothesis of evolution been entertained
in the sixteenth or the seventeenth century, it would
have been vain to presume that the being, transitional
alike in form and mind, which it presupposes, might not
then exist in some unexplored region of the world.
Now, however, such an idea cannot be entertained. On
the contrary the advocates of the theory acknowledge
the existence of an enormous and indeed ever-widening
break in the organic chain between man and his nearest
aUies, which cannot be relinked by any living or extinct
species.

The most brutish of human savages holds out no
acknowledgment of near affinity to the most anthropoid
of apes ; and imagination is left to work its will in
realising the intermediate being, midway between the
two, in which the brute came to an end and man began.

D 2

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

To the evolutionist, the whole process by which such a
change is assumed to have resulted seems so easy that
he slights, if he does not wholly pass over, this final
transitional stage, unconscious of the difficulties pressing
on minds not less earnestly awakened to the reception
of novel truths. To the inquirer who still acknowledges
a natural repugnance to the acceptance of a law of
progress which makes man no more than a highly de-
veloped ape, it is difiicult to give the imagination fair
play in whatever share it should take in the solution
of the problem. Yet imagination has its legitimate
work to perform. In the grand discoveries of science,
the conceiving imagination, which 'darts the soul into
the dawning plan,' and realises beforehand what is to be
proved by severest induction, plays a part no less im-
portant than in the work of the poet. But happily at
this stage we are enabled to summon to our aid the most
original and creative fancy to realise for us the large-
brained, half-reasoning brute, with some capacity for
continuous thought and the accumulations of experience,
but as yet devoid of moral sense, and so actuated solely
by animal cravings and passions.

Such a creature, it is admitted by the evolutionist,
required very peculiar and exceptional circumstances to
allow of its perpetuation. On any theory of the suivival
of the fittest it is difficult to deal with a being inferior
in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the
lowest existing aavag^is ; and at the same time inferior in
brute-like powers, in the offensive or defensive weapons
of nature, in the prehensile aptitude for climbing trees,
in natural clothing, in all means of escape from danger
or violence incident to its condition. But the peculiar
circumstances which can alone give it the chance of sur-
vival are hypothetically found for it in an imaginary

THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

island of the cainozoic world, \varm and genial in climate,
furnished with abundance of suitable food, and free from
all special dangers. If Plato may have freest scope with
his Atlantis, More with his Utopia, and Swift with his
Laputa, it would be hard to stint our modern philoso-
phers in the furnishing of their more ancient island with
all needful requisites for a commonwealth on which the
very existence of every subsequent one is believed by
them to depend.

The genial protection of an island-home may well
suggest itself to the race which owes so much to the
protective insulation of Britain. In far-off palaeolithic
ages, when its manufacturing energies were exhausted
on the flint and bone implements of the Drift-Folk, it
was a bit of the neighbouring continent, and had its
troubles accordingly, with cave-tigers, cave-bears, and
other devouring monsters, such as must have been
wholly unknown to that happy island-home of the
ape-progenitor of man, when in his latest evolutionary
stage, Britain was made and unmade, so far as its
insular autonomy is concerned, during the post-Pliocene
period. It had been reunited to the continent, after
a lengthened period of insulation, when man coexisted
with the mammoth, and the Thames is believed to have
been a tributary of the Rhine. But happily its tribu-
tary eras lie far off and obscure ; and through all its
latest and best stages of ethnical and historical evolu-
tion its occupants may well

• Thank Him who isled us here, and roughly set
His Saxon in blown seas and storming showers.'

Here, in one of England's pleasantest vales, in the year
1564, and in an age in which the moral and intellectual
energies of the human race were manifesting themselves
with peculiar force throughout the civilised world,

">»».,

"*,fi,^

y^'Hj.

' 1-

IE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION.

Shakespeare was born ; and he, before the close of his
too brief career, dealt with the very conception which
now seems so difficult to realise, and, untrammelled
alike by Darwinian theories or anti-Darwinian pre-
judices, gave the 'airy nothing a local habitation and
a name.' .

lis
ch
2d
e-
id

CHAPTER III.

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

'Antonio. What impossible matter will he make easy next?

Sebastian. I think he will carry this island home in his pocket, and
give it his son for an apple.

Antonio. And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more
islands.' — The Tempest.

I ^HE idea of an island-world lying in some unex-
-i- plored ocean, beyond the influences that affect
humanity at large, with its native beings, institutions, its
civilisation, and a history of its own, has been the dream
of very diverse ages, and the fancy of very dissimilar
minds. It seems far from improbable, that in early
unrecorded centuries, when, nevertheless, voyagers of
the Mediterranean claimed to have circumnavigated the
coasts of Africa, the world beyond the western ocean
was not unknown to them. Vague intimations, derived
seemingly from Egypt, encouraged the belief in a sub-
merged island or continent, once the seat of arts and
learning, far on the Atlantic main. The most definite
narrative of this lost continent is that recorded in the
* Timasus ' of Plato, on the authority of an older account
which Solon is affirmed to have received from an Egyp-
tian priest. The narrative is not without an air of
truthfulness, when read in the light of modern geogra-
phical and geological disclosures. The priest of the
Nile claims for the temple-records of Egypt a vast
antiquity, and tells the Athenian lawgiver that his
people are mere children, their histories but nursery
tales. In fables and vague traditions of the Greeks,

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

faint memories had survived of deluges and convulsions
by which the earth had been revolutionised in ages long
prior to their historical records. In one of those the
vast island of Atlantis — a continent larger than Lybia
and Asia conjoined, — had been ingulfed in the ocean
which bears its name.

Whether the idea was a mere fancy of the first Egyp-
tian narrator, or an allusion to transatlantic islands and
continents with which communication had been held in
some earlier age, it pleased the poets and philosophers
of antiquity ; and frequent references occur in Greek and
Roman authors to the lost Atlantis. But above all, this
oceanic world of fancy or tradition has a special interest
as the seat of Plato's imaginary commonwealth ; while it
acquired a new significance when Columbus revealed
what actually lay beyond that mysterious ocean in
which the Hesperides and other mythological islands of
antiquity had been placed by the poets.

When the geologist in our own day proceeds to define
the physical geography of Europe in that strange glacial
period when the British Islands were conjoined to a
continent which then existed in a condition analogous to
the Arctic wastes of Greenland at the present time, he
deals with revelations of science which outvie the legends
of the old Nile, and restores a lost Atlantis to us,
peopled with its extinct fauna, and on which man also
appears, furnished with strange weapons and primeval
arts. In the sober literalness of scientific induction,
the chorographer far outrivals the fables of antique
mythology, and undertakes to furnish, from well-
accredited data, an ideal restoration of continents and
islands as they existed when the Elcphas Mcridionalis,
or huge pachyderm, older than the mammoth, roamed
in their forests ; or of that island which was neither

CALIBAN 'S ISLAND.

4«

Ireland nor England, though it included much of both,
over which the Mcgaceros, or gigantic deer of the Irish
bogs, wandered at will ; and the human cave-dwellers of
centuries undreamt of in historical chronology, played
their unheeded part in the primeval dawn. Remoter,
however, than that submerged and renewed island-
world of prehistoric ages is the birthplace or scene of
latest evolution of man's progenitor. It has to be
located as yet with the Atlantis of Plato and the
Utopia of More, in some unexplored ocean of unimagin-
ably remote eras. But who shall venture to say that
it lies beyond the compass of science in the triumphs of
the coming time }

Already the first steps have been indicated whereby
the explorer is to pursue his way towards that undeter-
mined birthplace of man, at that stage of the pedigree
where our progenitors diverged from that selected
catarhine division of the Simiadae, the determination
of which robs the western world of all claim to the
primeval Atlantis. The fact that the Simian progeni-
tors of man belonged to this stock clearly shows, ac-
cording to its demonstrator, that they inhabited the
old world ; but, Mr. Darwin adds, ' not Australia, nor
any oceanic island, as we may infer from the laws of
geographical distribution. In each great region of the
world the living mammals are closely related to the
extinct species of the same region. It is therefore
probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct
apes closely alHeji to the gorilla and chimpanzee ; and
as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is
somewhat more probable that our early progenitors
lived on the African continent than elsewhere.' When,
however, Mr. Darwin is speculating on the immediate
Simian ancestry of man, he reflects on the deficiency in

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

the social element of the huge, powerful, ferocious
gorilla : whereby the development of such peculiarly
human qualities as sympathy, and the love of his
fellow-creatures, would be impeded in an improved
descendant ; and hence he conceives that it may have
been no unimportant element in the ampler humanity
of the final evolution, that man sprung rather from some
comparatively small and weak species Hke the chim-
panzee, but growing ultimately larger and stronger,
even while losing such offensive and defensive appli-
ances as pertained to his brute-original. The social
element which leads man to give and receive aid, when
combined with his tool -making aptitude, more than
counterbalances any inferiority in strength to the wild
beasts he may have to encounter. The puny Bushman
of Africa holds his ground against the fiercest animals
of that continent, and the stunted Esquimaux is equally
successful in resisting alike the physical hardships and
the ravenous monsters of arctic snows. Still Mr.
Darwin recognises the peculiar dangers incident to that
last semi-human transitional stage. 'The early pro-
genitors of man,' he remarks, 'were, no doubt, inferior
in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the
lowest existing savages ; but it is quite conceivable that
they might have existed, or even flourished, if while
they gradually lost their brute-like powers, such as
climbing trees, &c., they at the same time advanced in
intellect. But granting that the progenitors of man
were far more helpless and defenceless than any exist-
ing savages, if they had inhabited some warm continent,
or large island, such as Australia, or New Guinea, or
Borneo, they would not have been exposed to any
special danger.'

So says Mr. Darwin, when in search of an earthly

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

paradise for the brute-progenitor of man. In such an
imagined island, with all other conditions favouring, he
sees no further impediment to the final elevation of
this transitional being to a perfected humanity, 'through
the survival of the fittest, combined with the inherited
effects of habit.' But such a process, under the most
favourable conditions, must be conceived of as one
multiplied through countless generations, during which
that irrational animal rose by imperceptible degrees
into the novel condition of a rational intelligent being.

Though Borneo— still tenanted by the orang, — is
selected by Mr. Darwin as an island presenting many
such requirements as the early progenitors of man
stood in need of, its area is insufificient for some of the
necessities of a being so widely diffused within the
remotest ascertainable period of his existence. He
points rather to an insular Africa as the seat of the
catarhine Eden, where the final step in anthropomor-
phic evolution was effected ; yet in this he owns that
speculation is striving after what probably lies beyond
its reach. The continents of that imagined era, what-
ever their fauna may have included, lie for the most
part among the ruins of an elder geological world,
submerged it may be by oceans that have long since
upheaved their beds into new land ; and the data by
means of which the obliterated map may be retraced,
have yet to be sought for in their buried strata. But
in the map of that other world of fancy over which
the genius of Shakespeare reigns supreme, an island
may still be found, such as the speculator on man's
evolution and long descent craves for his last transi-
tional stage. There the dramatist, for purposes of his
own, has anticipated the enormous lapse of time need-
ful for evolving intellect out of such irrational germs,

■14

CAIJlhlN'S ISLAND.

by bringing the rude, speechless, 'freckled whelp,'
with its brute-like powers and instincts, into direct
contact with intellect in its very highest activity.
Humanity is represented as endowed with extraor-
dinary, or even what may for our present purpose be
styled miraculous powers ; and so the transmutation,
for which under any conceivable normal process its
originators would deem centuries inadequate, is ex-
hibited as it were under a forcing process, whereby we
can study some of its most important gradations as
they presented themselves to the most original and
objective mind.

The sixteenth century, to which this latter evolu-
tionist belongs, was an age of earnest faith, nor alto-
gether devoid of credulity. To the men of Shakespeare's
day, the strange approximations to humanity which
we are now called on, in reliance upon severest scien-
tific induction, to realise for ourselves, by no means
seemed so improbable as they now do. The new
worlds of which Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, the
apocryphal Raphael Hythloday, Gomara, Lane, Harriott
and Raleigh wrote, seemed more fitly occupied by
Calibans than any ordinary type of humanity. The
grotesque tales of monsters, giants, and the like super-
natural extravagances, with which Mandeville and
other early travellers garnished their narratives, were
suited to the expectations, no less than to the taste
of much more enlightened ages than theirs. The most
incredible news that a Columbus or a Raleigh could
have brought back from the New World, would have
been the reported existence of men and women, in
person, customs, arts, and all else, exactly like them-
selves. It was in all honesty that Othello entertained
Desdemona with the story of his life, — ..

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

' Of moving accidents by flood and field,
And of the cannibals that each other eat.
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.'

And in like ingenuous simplicity to hear this 'would
Dcsdcmona seriously incline ; ' for Shakespeare had the
very best authority for such quaint anthropophagi. In
his account of Guiana, Raleigh tells of a nation of
people on the Caoro ' whose heads appear not above
their shoulders, which, though it may be thought a
mere fable, yet,' says the astute Raleigh, ' I am re-
solved it is true, because every child in the provinces
of Arromaia and Canuri affirms the same. They are
called Ewaipanoma ; they are reported to have their
eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle
of their breasts.' Though all the exertions of Raleigh
to get sight of those marvellous Ewaipanoma, the true
type of antipodes, proved vain, yet he evidently
credited the story. He reverts to it anew in another
place, as a thing in which he fully believed ; and when
enumerating the various tribes by which the region is
occupied, he states, as though it were a fact no less
thoroughly authenticated than all else he has to write
about, 'To the west of Caroli are divers nations of
cannibals, and of those Ewaipanoma without heads.'

Mr. Joseph Hunter fancies Prospero's enchanted
island to have been in the Mediterranean ; and indeed
the foremost point to be established by his ' Disquisi-
tion on Shakespeare's Tempest' is that the island of
Lampedusa, lying midway between Malta and the
African coast, is the veritable Prospero's island. ' It
is precisely in the situation which the circumstances
of every part of the story require. Sailors from
Algiers land Sycorax on its shores ; Prosper©, sailing
from an Italian port, and beating about at the mercy

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

of the waves, is found at last with his lovely charge,
at Lampcdusa ; Alonzo, sailing from Tunis, and steer-
ing his course for Naples, is driven by a storm a little
out of his track, and lights on Lampedusa.' So writes
Mr. Hunter, with even less doubt about his enchanted
island than Sir Walter Raleigh entertained regarding
the headless Ewaipanoma on the Caoro river of ' the
beautiful empire of Guiana.' It only remains to trace
out Ariel's course to the same island, and then all its
occupants will be accounted for. Nor is this wholly
neglected, for Mr. Hunter gravely notes that 'Lam-
pedusa is in seas where the beautiful phenomenon is
often seen, called by sailors the Querpo Santo, or the
Fires of Saint Helmo. The commentators have told
us that these fires are the fires of Ariel. But the
very name of the island itself, Lampcdusa^ may seem
to be derived, as Fazcllus says it is, from flames such
as Ariel's.' The island measures in circuit thirteen
miles and a half, is situated in a stormy sea, abounds
with troglodytic caves, and ' /riters worthy of confi-
dence assert that no one can reside in it, on account
of the phantasms, spectres, and horrible visions that
appear in the night : repose and quiet being banished
by the formidable apparitions and frightful dreams
that fatally afflict with deathlike terrors whoever does
remain there so much as one night.' Were it worth
while marshalling evidence to refute all this, the
first witness to be summoned is Caliban himself, who
gives it all the flattest contradiction so far as his
island is concerned. * Come, swear to that ; kiss the
book,' says Stephano, when he tells him that his mis-
tress, the old witch Sycorax, had shown him the man
in the moon, with his dog and brush. But he tells
him without prompting, that —

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

' The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give deli4;ht and hurt not;'

and so far from night being made horrible by fright-
ful apparitions, the poor monster found his dreams so
delightful that when he waked he cried to dream
again. Ferdinand, again, might very properly be
called on to explain how it was that, if Lampedusa, a
Mediterranean island, within easy sail of the neigh-
bouring Italian coast, was the actu d Prospcro's isle,
it should have struck him as so marvellous a thing to
meet a maiden there whose speech was Italian, that
he exclaims in utter astonishment, ' My language !
heavens ! * Mr. Hunter does indeed proceed with
other coincidences, to him absolutely extraordinary.
There is on Lampedusa an actual hermit's cell, and
'this cell is surely the origin of the cell of Prospcro.'
Again, ' there is a coincidence which would be very
extraordinary if it were merely accidental, between
the chief occupation of Caliban and the labour im-
posed upon Ferdinand, on the one hand, and some-
thing which we find belonging to Lampedusa on the
other, Caliban's employment is collecting firewood.
It may be but for the use of Prospero. But Ferdinand
is employed in piling up thousands of logs of wood.'
It only requires, in order to complete the coincidence,
to assume that Duke Prospero drove a brisk trade in
firewood with the Algerine and other sailors ; for he
could not possibly want all this huge pile for him-
self. In reality the task of piling logs, to which
Ferdinand is compelled by Prospero, as a test of
his devotion to Miranda, is just the very work
of which the English adventurers who accompanied
Captain Smith to Virginia, are found making in-
dignant complaint, and adds one more indication to

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

point US beyond the Atlantic in search of the magic
isle. . •

Chalmers and Malone have concurred in asserting,
that the title of the play, as well as the circumstances
of its opening scene, were suggested by a dreadful hurri-
cane which dispersed the fleet of Sir George Somers, in
July, 1609, when on the way to the infant colony of
Virginia with a large supply of men and provisions.
The ship, called ' The Admiral,' with Sir George Somers
and Sir Thomas Gates on board, was separated from
the rest of the fleet, and wrecked on the island of
Bermuda. Of this an account was published by Jourdan
the following year, entitled ' A Discovery of the Ber-
mudas, otherwise called the Isle of Devils ;' and it
is by no means improbable that from this pamphlet
Shakespeare derived the first hint of the incidents on
which the plot of 'The Tempest' is constructed. But as
Ariel is despatched for dew to ' the still-vexed Ber-
moothes,' that at least is not the scene of Prospero's
enchantments ; nor was it in any degree requisite that
the dramatist should gi^' precise longitude and latitude
to the ' uninhabited isidud,' where the scenes of his
' Tempest ' are laid. The poets had in various ways
an interest in the strange worlds that were then being
revealed beyond the Atlantic. Spenser had as his
special friend and wise critic, Sir Walter Raleigh, ' The
Shepheard of the Ocean,' who ' said he came far from
the main-sea deep,' Sir Philip Sidney's correspondence
is replete with evidence of the interest he took in the
voyages of Gilbert, Frobisher, and others, 'for the
finding of a passage to Cathaya ; ' and to him is dedi-
cated the first publication of Hakluyt, 'touching the
discoveries of America and the islands adjacent unto
the same.' The Earl of Southampton, the noble

CAL/PAN'S ISLAND.

godfather to Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' the
' first heir of his invention,' was an active co-operator in
the Virginia Company. Ralph Lane, whose letters,
written on the island of Roanoke in 1585, have an in-
terest as the oldest extant English writings from the
New World, sailed under Raleigh's patronage ; and
Thomas Harriott, who was in his family, not only pur-
sued on the same island the algebraic experiments to
which the solution of equations was due, but carried out
some of those astronomical observations which, among
other distinctions, now mark him for special note as the
first observer of the spots on the sun. Have we not,
in this Thomas Harriott — discoverer of the complete
system of modern algebra, rival of Galileo in the first
observations on the satellites of Jupiter, author of the
' Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of
Virginia, ' and reputed bearer of the gift of ' divine
tobacco' to the English nation, — the true type of
Pro.spero, who, with the aid of his magical books and
his potent wand, could boast that he had bedimmed
the noontide sun ?

That Shakespeare had in view the strange new lands
of the western ocean we can discern very clearly ; for
Gonzalo comforts his companions in their affright at some
of the monstrous ' people of the island' very much in
Raleigh's own words :

' Faith, sir, you need not fear. When we were boys,
Who would believe that there were mountaineers
Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at 'em
Wallets of flesh ? or that there were such men
Whose heads stood in their Dreasts? which now we find
Each putter-out of five for one will bring us
- . Good warrant of.'

The 'putters -out of five for one' were the merchant
adventurers, who risked their money, and not unfre-

■,,.;;..■•■ ■ : E

6°

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

■■

quently their lives, in the search for new worlds, and
came back laden with travellers' tales, if with no other
riches.

It is vain to search on the map for Prospero's island.
Malone and Chalmers, indeed, entertained no doubt
that Shakespeare had Bermuda in view. Mr. Joseph
Hunter, among other notices of Shakespeare's own
time, quotes a curious account, from ' The Silver Watch
Beir of Thomas Tymme, of the Bermudas, or Isle of
Devils, where ' to such as approach near the same, there
do not only appear fearful sights of devils and evil
spirits, but also mighty tempests with most terrible and
continual thunder and lightning, and the noise of
horrible cries, with screeching/ &c., which are reported
to make all glad to fly with utmost speed from the
horrible place. This is supposed to have suggested to
Shakespeare the scene of his opening tempest, and the
island whereon Sycorax preceded his enchantments
with her terrible sorceries. Moore, in his ' Epistle from
the Bermudas,' accordingly says, 'We cannot forget that
it is the scene of Shakespeare's Tempest ; and that here
he conjured up the delicate Ariel, who alone is worth
the whole heaven of ancient, mythology.' Mr. Hunter
Vas felt it incumbent on him to enter on a course of
very elaborate argument to overthrow these Bermudan
claims, before his own grand Lampedusan discovery
could have any chance of popular favour. But the
whole argument was very needless. Wherever Pros-
pero's isle may have been, the poet was careful to tell
us that it was not Bermuda ; otherwise how could Ariel
have been called up at midnight to do his master's
errand, and 'fetch dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes'.?
In truth, the island belongs to the poet's sole domain ;
and having done its work in the realm of fancy, we may

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

be content to leave it till modern science rediscover it and
its true lord, the missing Caliban of fancy or of fact.
Otherwise ' deeper than did ever plummet sound,' it lies
with Prospero's magic books.

From Milan the banished duke and his infant daughter
were indeed borne only some leagues to sea, before they
were abandoned in

' A rotten carcass of a boat, net rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast : the very rats
Instinctively had quit it.'

But then the noble Gonzalo had not only furni.shed
his old master with rich garments and provisions of ail
sorts, but out of the ducal library had culled the
precious volumes of science and of magic which he
prized above his dukedom ; and so, with these and his
wizard staff, he was as well provisioned for an ocean
voyage as the witch in ' Macbeth,' when she set sail for
Aleppo in a sieve : able no less to dispense with helm
or oar than ' a rat without a tail.' When tlie scene
opens with the tempest, which gives name to this
charming drama, we learn indeed that the rest of the
fleet which had escorted the usurping duke in his
unpropitious voyage, after being storm-tossed and dis-
persed by Ariel's wiles,

'All have met again,
And are upon the Mediterranean flote,
Bound Jradly home for Naples.'

But the ocean tides rise and fall upon the yellow sands
of Prospero's island as they never did to Virgil's sea-
nymphs ; and Avhcn he would

' Betwixt the green sea and the a.rur'd vault
Set roaring wai,'

rwnr

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

he can call at will, not only the

' Elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves ;
But those that on the sands witli printless feet
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back.'

Prospero is, indeed, full of the idea of the tide's ebb and
flow, as if to remove his enchanted island beyond all
question into regions remotest from Mediterranean
tideless shores. When, at the last, he has all charmed
within his enchanted circle, he exclaims, in mingled
metaphor and allusion —

' Their understanding
Begins to swell ; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That nowr lies foul and muddy.'

There is one anciently described island of the New
World, very familiar to the men of Shakespeare's day,
and which it is obvious enough that the poet himself had
in view, when he lets the gentle Gonzalo picture to us
what would be, had he the plantation of this new-found
isle. He is fresh from the study of Montaigne's philo-
sophy ; and as to the island-scene of his communistic
idealism, it is the veritable Utopia of which Sir Thomas
More had already learned so much from the Raphael
Hythloday of his philosophic fiction. Gonzalo, we must
remember, philosophises in playful banter, dealing in such
wise fooling as may suit his fickle auditors : ' Gentlemen
of brave mettle, who would lift the moon out of her sphere,
if she would continue in it five weeks without changing!'
It is thus he deals with the Platonic fiction : —

' Gori. V the cou:"nonweaIth, I would by contraries
Execute all things ; lor no kind of traffic
Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ;
Letters should not be known : riches, poverty,

CALIBAN'S ISLAND.

And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil :
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too; but innocent and pure:
No sovereignty ; —

Seh. Yet he would he king on 't.

Ant. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning.

Gon. All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony.
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine.
Would I not have ; but nature should bring forth.
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

Seh. No marrying 'niong his subjects?

.(4m/. 'None, man; all idle; whores and knaves.

Gon. I would with such perfection govern, sir,
To excel the golden age.

Seh. Save his majesty !

Ant. Long live Gonzalo !

Gon. And, — do you mark me, sir?

Alon. Prithee, no more : thou dost talk nothing to me.

Gon. I do well believe your highness; and did it to minister
occasion to these gentlemen, who are of such sensible and nimble
lungs that they always use to laugh at nothing.'

But when we have identified Prospcro's island with the
Utopia of Hythloday, we are still far as ever from fixed
longitudes and latitudes ; for it is but the outottos, the
nowhere, of . lore's imaginary commonwealth : nowhere,
yet nevertheless the discovery of a reputed fellow-
V vager of Amerigo Vespucci. With this latter help to
SI h geographical research, the mythology of the island
agr es : for Setebos, the god of the witch Sycorax, is
a Patagonian deity, mentioned by Richard Eden in his
* History of Travayle in the West and East Indies, and
other countreys lying eyther way towardes the fruitful!
and ryche Moluccaes.' There it may be presumed
Shakespeare picked up the name, and what else he
needed for the 'uninhabited island' — uninhabited, that
is, so far as human beings are concerned, before Pros-

■HH

C A LTD AN' S ISLAND.

pero's arrival, — which he has peopled for us so well.
There, as Ariel tells his master in the second act —

' Safely in harbour
Is the king's ship; in the dee]) nook, where once
Thou call'd'st me up at midnight to fetch 'dew
From the still-vex'd Bermoothes.'

The island, therefore, is not farther, at any rate, from
the Bermudas, than from Naples or Milan ; and though
the dispersed fleet is once more safely afloat on the
Mediterranean, and — all but the king's ship, — already
bound for Naples, before Prospero restores his Ariel to
the elements, that tricksy spirit has one more duty to
perform ; and so the Duke is able to promise to all

'Calm seas, auspicious gales.
And sail so expeditious, that shall catch
The royal fleet far off,'

and so be in Naples as soon as them. It is vain, then,
to apply any ordinary reckoning to such voyagers' log,
or to seek by longitude or latitude to fix the locality
of Caliban's island-home : any more than to map out
on a geographical chart of modern centuries that pre-
historic Borneo, New Guinea, or other anthropomorphic
Eden, where the half-brute progenitor of man, when in a
state considerably in advance of the chimpanzee, orang,
or gorilla, in all intellectual attributes, but far more help-
less and defenceless than any existing savage, found
those favouring conditions which admitted of the slow
process of evolution resulting in MAN.

CHAPTER IV.

THE TEMPEST.

* Sehasiian. A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne; one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.' — The Tempest.

THE grave comedy which suppHes to us Shakespeare's
realisation of the half-human beings which in the
sixteenth century were supposed to inhabit the new-
found lands of the deep-sea main, is in other respects
rich in some of the choicest imaginings of his genius.
In ' The Tempest,' as in the lighter comedy of ' A Mid-
summer Night's Dream,' his fancy revels in the embodi-
ment of the supernatural creed of his own day. In both
the homely and grotesque inLermingle with the super-
human elements of the drama with such seeming
naturalness and simplicity, that it becomes no more im-
probable than the marvels of night's wonderland appear
to the dreamer. But it is with a graver purpose and
more earnest meaning that Shakespeare has wrought the
scenes of the later drama into such artful consistency ;
and interwoven with the unsophisticated tenderness of
Miranda's love, the philosophy of Gonzalo, and Duke
Prospero's sage reflections on this fleeting shadow of
mortality.

The Caliban of 'The Tempest,' cannot be rightly
estimated, unless viewed in the rich setting in which
Shakespeare has placed his rude disproportioned shape.
It is, as a whole, an assay piece of his art. He sports

THE TEMPEST.

there with its difficulties, as the Prospero of his own
creation does with the spirits of the elements ; and
seems to have set himself what shall task and prove the
ample compass of his power. He endows Prospero with
superhuman wisdom, and arms him with all the" for-
, bidden mastery of the magician's art ; yet preserves to
him the generous attributes of a noble nature, giving ab-
solute power, where it is employed without abuse under
the restraints of virtue. In Miranda he aims at realising
what a pure guileless woman would become, trained
from infancy apart from all intercourse with her own
sex, nurtured in every refinement of intellectual culture,
yet the inmate of a rude cell, ignorant of all the conven-
tionalities which society breeds, and having never from
infancy seen any human being but her own father. In
her, accordingly, Shakespeare embodies all that is pure
and lovely in true womanhood, apart from the conven-
tional proprieties of artificial life ; and having thus made

her

' So perfect and so peerless ; one created
Of every creature's best,'

yet not perfected into aught that is superhuman, he
places alongside of her two other beings begot by the
same prolific fancy, the one above and the other below
the rank of humanity. Of these the superhuman is an
ethereal spirit, incapable of human passions, and only
withheld from the elements, in which it longs to mingle, by
the constraining power of Prospero's magical art ; the
other is the rude, earth-born animal which so strikingly
realises for us the highest conceivable development of
brute-nature. They stand alongside of each other, yet
have nothing in common, hold no intercourse, exchange
no words : the representative embodiments, as it were, of
two incompatible elements brought into compulsory ap-

THE TEMPEST.

position by the mediate humanity of Prospero. The
scenes in which such widely diverse characters enact
their parts, constitute as a whole one of the most
original, as it is one of the most beautiful, of all that
special department of the Shakespearean drama in which
the world of ideal fancy mingles without constraint with
the realities of ev^ery-day life.

In the list of characters, or * Names of the Actors,' as
it is styled, appended to the first edition of the play,
Caliban is described as ' a salvage and deformed slave,'
and has a rank assigned to him between the noble
followers of the King of Naples and Trinculo the jester,
Stephano, a drunken butler, and the rude sailors ; while
Miranda intervenes between the latter and Ariel, 'an
ayerie spirit,' with the other spirits who play their part
as actors in the masque.

In the folio of 1623, 'The Tempest' ranks foremost in
place, and appeared there for the first time seven years
after its author's death. The supposition that it is the
very last of all the creations of his genius has already
been referred to. It is a poet's fancy, and cannot now
admit of proof. But the play is printed with so few im-
perfections, that it may be assumed to have been derived
directly from the author's manuscript. It may indeed
have been this manuscript — then fresh from Shake-
speare's pen, the final triumph of his magic art, — that
his editors had specially in view, when in the preface to
the collected edition of his dramas, they say, in loving
remembrance of the genius of their deceased friend :
' Who as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most
gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together,
and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that
we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.'

The last days of the poet had been pleasantly passed

5«

THE TEMPEST.

in the haunts of his boyhood ; and among his pastimes
it is not to be doubted had been the painsful pleasure of
revising and completing some of his marvellous dramas,
and preparing the whole for the press. To his brother
actors and literary executors — ' my fellows,' as he styles
them, — John Heminge and Henry Condell, he bequeathed
' twenty-six shillings and eightpence apiece, to buy them
rings ;' and to them were transferred the revised quartos
and original MSS. which were the source of the famous
1623 folio. 'We have scarce received from him a blot
in his papers,' the admiring editors declare. It were to
be wished that they had done their editorial work with
like pains and care. And yet had they done so the
world might not altogether have been the gainer. In
that case, for example, Pope had never produced his
superb critical edition of Shakespeare, in which he
laboured so assiduously to constrain the Elizabethan
poet's ' native wood-notes wild ' to a conformity with the
artificial standards of that year of grace A.D. 1725 ; and
then Theobald, 'poor piddling Tibbald,' would have had
no cause to write his ' Shakespeare Restored : or, a
Specimen of the Many Errors, as well committed as
unamended, in Pope's edition of this Poet ;' and so the
irascible little bard of Twickenham would have missed
the chief incentive which begot his ' Dunciad,' with
Theobald for its hero : —

' Where hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore,
Wished he had blotted fov himself before.'

The process of evolution thus originating in the ' errors
as well committed as unamended ' in the famous first
folio, has gone on in prolific multiplication of blots and
blotters, till Shakespearean commentaries and illustra-
tive criticisms have grown into a library ample enough

THE TEMPEST.

to task the reading of a lifetime. But ' The Tempest ' is
exceptional in the correctness of its text, as in much
else ; though Drydcn did league with D'Avenant to show
how utterly a noble work of art could be desecrated in
adapting it to the tastes of a mean age ; and Pope, in
trimming it to those of an artificial one, resyllabled its
heroic numbers, attuned to his own ear, if not counted
on his fingers ; and made other alterations which neither
the hero of the ' Dunciad ' nor any other sound critic
could accept as improvements.

To the refined reader of this exquisite comedy, the
central charm unquestionably must be that rare concep-
tion of purest womanly grace and instinctive delicacy,
Miranda. Womanly we call her, though she is but
fifteen, and as unsophisticated in her sweet simplicity as
when

' In the dark backward and abysm of time,'

' not out three years old,' she, with her banished father,
was hurried on board the leaky ' rotten carcass of a
boat ' which bore them to their island solitude. When,
at length, ' bountiful Fortune ' brought thither Prospero's
enemies, and placed them at his mercy : the same fortune
brought with these Ferdinand, the young heir to the
crown of Naples, to own that, though full many a lady
he had 'eyed with best regard,' and found in each some
special virtue to distinguish her, never till now did he
look on one that had not some defect. But the guileless
Miranda has no such experiences to tell of; and when
her father would restrain the too ready response of his
daughter to this noble lover, it is thus he schools her : —

:.^_ 'Thou think'st there is no more such shapes as he, .^. ;

Having seen but him and Caliban ; foolish wench 1

To the most of men this is a Caliban,
~'~"~ "^ "• And they to him are angels.' -~ - •

THE TEMPEST.

t \

I i

But she only replies —

' My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man.'

She gives her whole heart, in utter unconsciousness of
the prudent fears which trouble her father, lest ' too light
winning make the prize light.' Her innocency is still as
untutored as when the scarce three-years-old child parted
with the last of those woman-tendants whose memory
haunted her rather like a dream than an assurance of
which memory gave any warrant. She tells her lover :

' I do not know
One of my sex ; no woman's face remember,
Save, from my glass, nr own: nor have I seen
More that I may call ni than you, good friend.
Ami my dear father: how features are abroad,
T am skilless of; but, by my modesty,
The jewel in my dower, I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you:
Nor can imagination form a shape.
Besides yourself, to like of.'

And so this ' fair encounter of two most rare affections '
proceeds in ' plain and holy innocence' : the realisation
of a child of nature, unrestrained by all mere conventional
proprieties, but guided by the unerring instincts of
native modesty and purity.

The setting of this exquisite creation of Shakespeare's
genius has been designed with rare art to display by
contrast the peculiar graces of perfect womanhood. The
refined, ethereal, dainty Ariel, most delicate of sprites,
incapable of affections that can become tender, and yet,
though 'but of air,' having a touch, a feeling of human
affections, hovers around Miranda, fulfilling her father's
commands, but otherwise no more familiar with her
than the zephyrs which lift her hair and fan her cheek.

THE TEMPEST.

He is a sylph-like, spiritual essence, suited for fancy's
lightest behests ; a being born as it were of the sweet
breeze . 'id the butterfly, js incapabl' of human love as
of human hate or sin. But while this embodiment of
the zephyr floats airily about Miranda in her mortal
loveliness, by the cunning art of the dramatist she is
brought into more immediate contact with the other
extreme. Caliban is her fellow-creature, in a way that
Ariel could never be, and provokes comparisons such as
the other in no way suggests. For his is the palpable
grossness of a lower nature, a creature of earth, not
unredeemed by its own fitting attributes nor untrue to
itself, but altogether below the level of humanity.

Of the estimate formed of this unique creation of
genius by the men of Shakespeare's own day, we have
very slight means of judging. Rut the evidence of an
utter incapacity for appreciating his genius by the
Restoration court and age is nowhere more manifest
than in the impure vulgar buffoonery with which the
greatest of the poets of that new era helped to travesty
the wild and savage nature of Caliban. 'The Tem-
pest ; or, The Enchanted Island,' takes its place among
the collected works of John Dryden, though it might
perhaps more fitl>' rank with the forgotten dr.imas,
masques, and other productions of Davenant's pen.
Referring to their joint labours in vulgarising and pol-
luting Shakespeare's comedy, Dryden says : ' It was
originally Shakespeare's, a poet for whom he had a
particularly high veneration, and whom he taught me
first to admire.' The mode adopted by teacher and
pupil for giving expression to their admiring veneration
is sufficiently equivocal. The play itself, as Dryden
tells us, had formerly been acted with success in the
Blackfriars ; and its aptness for scenic effect and showy

THE TEMPEST.

spectacle — far more, it is to be presumed, than any ap-
preciation of its higher excellences, — tempted Fletcher,
Suckling, D'Avenant, and Dryden himself, to tamper with
its delicate refinement, and debase it by means of
spurious adaptations to the taste of a corrupt age. As
to Fletcher's ' Sea Voyage,' he has rather borrowed the
idea than tampered with the text of Shakespeare's
' Tempest ' ; and as the supernatural elements are
wholly omitted, it need not detain us. ' The Desert
Islands' of Fletcher arc the scene of a gyneocracy
or commonwealth of women : a Utopian paradise,
which ' yields not fawns, nor satyrs, or most lustful
men ; ' and he only borrows remotely the one idea
of women trained from infancy on a desert island,
without knowledge of the other sex. The Clarinda of
Fletcher is mainly his own creation, and scarcely pro-
vokes the comparison with Shakespeare's Miranda which
it is so little fitted to stand. But D'Avenant and Dryden
deal with the latter even more coarsely than with
Caliban, in their efforts to adapt the chaste elder drama
to the lascivious revels of the Restoration court.

Sir William D'Avenant, cavalier and poet-laureat, with
whom Dryden was associated in the travesty of ' The
Tempest,' was the son of an Oxford innkeeper, at whose
hostle Shakespeare is said to have been a frequent guest.
The cavalier poet-laureat had been balked in his pur-
posed exploration of the new-found lands of the Western
world, exchanging for this only too ample opportunities
to yearn for the imaginary commonwealth in which
Gonzalo and many another philosophic dreamer had
purposed to excel the golden age. He was made
prisoner by a man-of-war in the service of England's
newly realised commonwealth, in 165 1, when on his
way to Virginia, to plant a royalist colony there ; and

THE TEMPEST.

SO exchanged the cavalier Utopia he was in search of,
for a long captivity in the Tower. But better days were
in store for him. After the Restoration he became
manager of the Duke of York's players, and did his
best to indemnify the dramatic muse for recent Puritan
restraints by every conceivable liberty that could be
found in the opposite extreme of licence. In the pre-
face to their joint labours, Dryden describes his fellow-
worker as ' a man of quick and piercing imagination,'
and ' of so quick a fancy that nothing was proposed to
him on which he could not suddenly produce a thought
extremely pleasant and surprising; and as his fancy was
quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new.
He borrowed not of any other ; and his imaginations
were such as could not easily enter into any other man,'
The commendations of his original and pregnant genius
read strangely out of place appended to such a specimen
of his art. His quick fancy and piercing imagination
are there shown by superadding to Shakespeare's Cali-
ban a twin-sister, Sycorax, of whom her brother tells
Trinculo, she is ' beautiful and bright as the full moon.
I left her clambering up a hollow oak, and plucking
thence the dropping honeycombs.' As to this beauty,
it is intended to be judged of by Caliban's own standard;
for she no sooner appears than Trinculo addresses her as
' my dear blubber-lips 1' But there is nothing to tempt us
to linger on Dryden's ' enchanted island,' unless it be the
marvel that within an interval so brief the taste of a whole
nation should have become so depraved as to tolerate
this gross caricature of an exquisite work of genius.

The strange being which invites our notice as the
native-born occupant of Shakespeare's nameless island,
and forms the counterpart to Ariel in the dramatic
setting by which Miranda is displayed with such

THE TEMPEST.

rare art, can only be properly estimated by the careful
student. At a first glance the brutish Caliban appears
to occupy a very subordinate place among the creations
of Shakespeare; and, compared with the ethereal
minister of Prospero's wizard spells, he is apt to be
regarded as a mere passive agent in the byplay of the
comedy. Placed, moreover, as he is, in direct contrast to
Miranda, ' so perfect and so peerless,' the half-human
monster appears all the more deformed. But, in
Dryden's vulgar travesty^ he becomes, with his mother's
legacy of ' great roaring devils,' the actual ' hag's seed '
and ' born devil ' of Prospero's mere wrathful hyperbole ;
and, worthless as this contemptible rifacciamento is in
all other respects, it has perhaps the one merit of .Hew-
ing how far removed the oiiginal Caliban is from the
vulgar twin-monsters of the Restoration stage.

So far from being cither superficial or repulsive,
Caliban is a character which admits of the minutest
study, and is wrought to the perfection of a consistent
ideal not less harmoniously, and even beautifully, than
Ariel himself. Both are supernatural beings, called into
existence by the creative fancy of the poet ; but the
grosser nature is the more original of the two : more
thoroughly imaged forth without the aid of current
fancies of elves, and sprites, and all the airy denizens
of Fairyland, which made the i^uck of Shakespeare
homely to all, and his Ariel, exquisite as it is. conceiv-
able enough. For Dryden truly says of the poet in
the prologue to his remodelled ' Tempest,' that ' he
wrote as people then believed ;' while Dryden himself
unhappily stooped to write as people of his later day
desired. But, if he was indeed first taught by Dave-
nant to admire Shakespeare, it is the less wonder that
he should so very partially appreciate the elements

THE 7'EMPEST.

(i>

cf his wondrous originality. In the same prologue
he says : —

' So from old Shakespeare's honoured dust, this day
Springs up and buds a new revivinjj play:
Shakespeare who, tauijht by none, did fi.st impart
To Fletcher wit, to lahouring Jonson art ;
He, monarch-like, gave lliose his subjects law.
And is tliat Nature which they paint and draw.'

But it is in a very {-seculiar and exceptional sense that
we can appeal to Nature in testing such impersonations
of contemporary belief as either Ariel or Caliban. They
arc creations conceived by the most original genius,
though fashioned in perfect narmony with the beliefs of
his age. To this they owe their peculiar charm. In
them, as in others of his rare imaginings, his supernatural
seems so natural, that we only realise to how large an
extent it is the work of his own fancy, when we test it
by comparison with that of his most gifted contem-
poraries.

It is the triumph of the poet thus to mirror the
thoughts of his age. He does not startle it with what
is strange, but with what seems most familiar to it. Yet
with all the scjming familiarity of those exquisite em-
bodiments of popular belief, and their consistency with
the folk-lore of the time, they are as purely fancy-
wrought as the visions that haunt unbidden the gay
romance of dreams. They were Shakespeare*s own
creations, but they seemed so thoroughly to realise
what already commanded universal credence, that the
charmed onlooker regarded them as no more than the
mirroring of his own vaguest fancies. The imaginative
power thus displayed in giving corporeal seeming and a
consistent individuality to such ' airy nothings ' will be
best appreciated by the reader who has already familiar-
ised himself with the supernatural beings that figure in

THE TEMPEST.

the verse of Marlow, Jonson, Fletcher, and even of
Milton. They are no less Shakespeare's own creations
than his Othello, or Hamlet, his Portia, Imogen, Ophelia,
or Lady Macbeth. He wrought indeed with the current
thought of his age, but of none of them can it be said,
that he merely produces the portraiture of what was
already lamiliar to it ; and least of all could this be
affirmed of Caliban. He is in a peculiar sense a super-
natural character, lying as much beyond the bounds of
human experience as any fairy, ghost, or spirit of the
creed of superstition, either in that age or our own :
earth-born, and fashioned on the ideal of the brute,
yet so distinct from anything hitherto seen or known
on earth, that only now, two centuries and a half after
its production on the English stage, has it entered into
the mind of the scientific naturalist to conceive of such
a being as possible.

CHAPTER V.

THE MONSTER CALIHAN.

' Arise, and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast.
And let the ape and tiger die.'

In Memoriam.

THE innate and seemingly instinctive aptitude of
the human mind to conceive of the supernatural
is so universal, and so intimately interwoven with that
other conception of a spiritual life, the successor of this
present corporeal existence, — which, far more than any
supposed belief in a Supreme Being, seems the universal
attribute of man, — that Shakespeare's whole conception
of the supernatural may fitly come under review as a
sequel to the more limited subject specially occupying
our consideration, Jiut it is sufficient for the present
to bear in mind the originality and prolific powers
revealed in his supernatural imaginings, in order the
more clearly to appreciate the one portraiture of a
being which, though in no sense spiritual, is so far as
all experience goes, thoroughly supra-natural.

"Tis strange, my Theseus,' says Hippolyta to her
ducal lover, as the fifth act of ' A Midsummer Night's
Dream' opens in a hall of his palace at Athens,
where they hold discourse on the themes that lovers
speak of. The previous scenes have been ripe with
the sportive creations of the poet's fancy, with his
Oberon, Titania, and all their fairy train ; and now, in

F 2

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

true dramatic fashion, he claims the shadowy be-
ings as his own. ' More strange than true,' Theseus
repHes : —

' I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends ; '

: ii

1 '

and then, after quaintly coupling the lover and the
lunatic as beings 'of imagination all compact,' he adds
this other picture of the poet's fantasies : —

' The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling.
Doth fflance froni heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ;
And as imagination bodies fortli
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination.'

As to the actual belief in the beings so dealt with,
among the men of that generation, it was vague an4
indeterminate as themsejves. When, indeed, tne poet
glanced to earth, and called up on Uie blastecj heath,
near by the scene of Macbcth's greai vic|:ory- over iilfe

Uicred fiags, tnat

jle ear|:|i, anc| yet

and qeei^-rooted

belief of liis ?|ge. wlieti Ugajii he glilticed from earth,

Norweyan host, tfiose wild antl w t

'looked not like the Jutmi3|^i||jis

were oh't.' |ie jdeailsed a vej-y iiais

belief of Jiis ?|ge. Wlieti itg'ijii

not to heaven, pv«t to \\\Ai intermediate spirit-world,

with all thtJ W^ III' rtdv llilijUanta with which fancy

or SMperstitloit jlatl favoured it, lie wrought with ma-

^BliHJs that had fashioned the creed of many generations.

He Had, himself, believed in fairies ; and doubtless still

IMgardfd ghosts with becoming awe. The" h\i\ held

mastefy nvpr his youtb.ful imagination; ^.^rn^tilui'..;; tii;

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

fancies and the terror of his childhood ; and were in
his maturer years translated into those supernatural
beings which have proved so substantial to other gene-
rations.

But the poet's own age had been familiarised with
ideal beings of a wholly different kind, the reality of
which seemed scarcely to admit of question. Of the
new world of the West which Columbus had revealed,
there was, at any rate, no room for doubt ; and yet
when, nearly a century after its discovery, Spenser
refers, in his ' Faerie Queen,' not only to the Indian
Peru and the Amazon, but to that ' fruitfullest Virginia '
of which his friend Raleigh had told him many a won-
drous tale, it is obvious that to his fancy America was
still almost as much a world apart as if his * Shepherd
of the Ocean ' had sailed up the blue vault of heaven, and
told of the dwellers in another planet on which it had
been his fortune to alight. He is defending the veri-
similitude of that Fairyland in which Una and the Red
Cross Knight, Duessa, Belphoebe, Orgoglio, Malecastaes
and so many more fanciful impersonations disport them-
selves, with King Arthur and the Faerie Queen herself:
and he argues that since Peru, Virginia, and all the
wonders of that new-found hemisphere prove to be real,
what marvel if this Fairyland of his fancy be no less
substantial a verity. For even now, of the world the
least part is known to us ; and daily through hardy
enterprise new regions arc discovered, as unheard-of as
were the huge Amazon, the Indian Peru, or other strange
lands now found true : —

' Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
Vet have from wisest ages hidden been;
And later tinies things more unknown shall show :
Why then should witless man so much misween,

I .'

;'!

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

That nothing is but that which he hath seen ?
What if, within the moon's fair shining sphere,
What if, in every other star unseen
Of other worlds he happily should hear?
He wonder would much more ; yet such to some appear.'

For voyagers to return from that new world with stories
of its being peopled with human beings Hke themselves,
was a kind of blasphemy intolerable to all honest
Christians. The council of clerical sages which as-
sembled in the Dominican Convent of St. Stephen, at
Salamanca, in i486, to take into consideration the theory
of Columbus as' to a Cathaya, or other world of hu-
manity lying beyond the Atlantic, after bringing all
the science and philosophy of the age to bear on the
subject, pronounced the idea of the earth's spherical
form heterodox, and a belief in antipodes incompatible
with the historical traditions of our faith : since to assert
that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of
the globe, would be to maintain that there were nations
not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them
to have passed the intervening ocean. This would
be, therefore, to discredit the Bible, which expressly
declares that all men are descendants of one common
pair.

It is amusing, but also instructive, thus to find an
ethnological problem of our own day adduced by the
orthodox sages of Salamanca in the fifteenth century
to prove that America could not exist. It is obvious
enough, that with such Dominican philosophers in
the councils of science, it was .safer for their orthodoxy
a.s well as their credibility, for travellers to tell of
' anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath
their .shoulders,' than to hint of a race of ordinary men
and women. This kind of union of scepticism and
credulity belongs exclusivel}'^ to no special epoch. A

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

7»

Story is told of a Scottish sailor returning to his old
mother, and greeting her with an account of the wonders
he had seen in far-away lands and seas. But his most
guarded narrations conflicted so entirely with her per-
sonal experience that they were repelled as wholly
incredible. ' Weel, mother,' said the baffled traveller,
' what will ye say when I tell you that, in sailing up
the Red Sea, on pulling up our anchor, we fand ane
o' Pharaoh's chariot-wheels on the fluke?' 'Ay, ay!
Sandy, that I can weel believe,' responded the old
dame; 'there's Scripture for that!' It was in a like
critical spirit that the men of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries refused all belief in the humanity of the
antipodes, while they welcomed the most monstrous
exaggerations for the very air of truthfulness they bore,
when tried by their own canons of credibility.

The reasoning of that age arranged itself in a very
simple syllogism. All men were descended from Adam ;
the beings inhabiting the worlds beyond the ocean could
not possibly be descended from Adam ; therefore they
were not human beings. Yet as truth slowly dawned
through a whole century, it became more and more
obvious that, whatever their pedigree might be, they
had many points in common with humanity. They had
a kind of speech of their own ; and could be taught
with no great difficulty that of their discoverers. They
had arts, arms, architecture and sculpture, and even
religious rites, though of a very horrible kind. So the
Spanish I> /'♦linicar <? pronounced them to be devils ; and
yet did not \\'holly abandon the hope of converting
them, and making them Christians after a sort. The
English adventurers, having no love for the Spaniards
of tlie New World, and a very special aversion to their
priests, were the less likely to be guided by their

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

estimation of the Carib or Mexican ; and hence there
grew up a vague idea of inhabitants of the strange
islands reported from time to time by returned voyagers,
who, though they could not possibly be of the race of
Adam, had yet a far nearer resemblance, in many ways,
to our perfected humanity than any ape, baboon, or
other anthropomorphous being with which older tra-
vellers had made them familiar.

On this ideal Shakespeare unquestionably wrought in
the creation of that ' freckled whelp,' as disproportioned
in manners as in shape, whom Prospero found sole
habitant of the lonely island on which he and Miranda
were cast. As to Caliban's maternity, the theories of
man's descent, and the consequent transitional stages
of an unperfected humanity, with which we are now
familiar, are of very modern date, and did not at all
lie in Shakespeare's vein, whatever Bacon might have
said of them. Unless the poet had contented himself
with simply letting Prospero find the strange monster
on the island, he had, like more modern philosophers,
to account in some way for his being; and so he vaguely
hints at supernatural conception, known to Prospero
only at second-hand. For the witch Sycorax had died,
and Ariel had writhed and groaned for years, imprisoned
in the rifted pine where she had left him, till Prospero
arrived and set him free. ' As thou report'st thyself,'
is accordingly the form in which Prospero alludes to
Sycorax and all else that pertained to those prehistoric
island-times before he set foot there. Sufificienr for us,
therefore, is it, that the Duke of Milan found on that
strange island just such a monstrous being as travellers'
tale? had already made familiar to all men as natives
of such regions. The terms Carib and Cannibal were
synonymous. The edicts of Isabella expressly excluded

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

the Carribeans from all the ordinary rights of humanity
on this very ground. They therefore were the anthro-
pophagi of travellers ' tales ; and Caliban is but an
anagram of the significant name.

'Do you put tricks upon us with savages and men
of Ind > ' says Stephano ; while the drunken Trinculo,
puzzling, in his besotted fashion, over Caliban, who has
fallen flat at his approach in the hope of escaping
notice, exclaims : ' What have we here ? a man or a
fish.!* A strange fish! Were I in Englaiid now, as once
I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday
fool there but vvould give a piece of silver ; there would
this monster make a man ; any strange beast there
makes a man ; when they will not give a doit to relieve
a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead
Indian. Legged like a man ! and his fins like arms !
Warm, o' my troth ! I do now let loose my opinion ;
hold it no longer : this is no fish, but an islander, that
hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.' It vvould be
curious to recover an exact delineation of the Caliban of
the Elizabethan stage. ' This is a strange thing as e'er
I looked on,' is the exclamation of the King of Naples,
when Caliban is driven in, along with the revellers who
have been plotting who should ' be king o' the ible ; ' and
on his brother, Sebastian, asking, 'What things are
these, my Lord Antonio ? ' he replies : ' One of them is
a plain fish, and no doubt marketable.' There was
obviously something marine, or fish-like, in the aspect
of the island monster. ' In the dim obscurity of the
past,' says Darwin, 'we can see that the early
progenitor of all the vertebrae must have been an
aquatic animal ; ' in its earliest stages ' more like the
larva} of our existing marine Ascidians than any
other known form,' but destined in process of time,

(!)

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

through lancelot, ganoid, and other kindred tran-
sitions, to —

•Suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.'

In Caliban there was undesignedly embodied, seemingly,
an ideal of the latest stages of such an evolution. Mr.
Joseph Hunter in dealing with this, as with other details,
in his Disquisition on Shakespeare's Tempest,' lets his
learning come into needless conflict with the idealisa-
tion of the poet. He will by no means admit of so
simple a solution of the name of Caliban as the mere
metathesis of cannibal, but goes in search for it among
the many names by which Caspar, Melchior, and Bal-
thazar, the three magi, were known throughout medieval
Europe. In like fashion he finds his form to be of
Hebraistic origin, and not at all 'a pure creation of
Shakespeare's own mind.' He accordingly proceeds to
'compare him with the fish-idol of Ashdod, the Dagon
of the Philistines . —

" Sea-monster ! upward man.
And downward fish." — P. L., Bk. i.

* Here we have also a figure half-fish, half-man ; ' and
so the learned commentator proceeds to questions of
Rabbinical literature ; discusses how the two elements
of fish and man coalesced in the form of Dagon ; quotes
Abarbinel and Kimchi ; and finally arrives at this con-
clusion : ' The true form of Dagon was a figure shaped
like a fish, only with feet and hands like a man. Now
this is precisely the form of Shakespeare's Caliban, " a
fish legged like a man, and his fins like arms." Nothing
can be more precise than the resemblance. The two
are in fnct one, as to form. Caliban is therefore a kind
of tortoise, the paddles expanding in arms and hands,
legs and feet. And accordingly, before he appears upon

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

the stage, the audience are prepared for the strange
figure by the words of Prospero : —

"Come forth, tli. u tortoise I "

' How he became changed into a monkey, while the play
is full of allusions to his ftsh-like form,' nc learned
critic leaves to others to explain.

There is an amusing hteralness in this application
alike of the confused ideas of the drunken Trinculo, and
of the invective of Prospero. The wrathful magician
calls to the creature whom Miranda his been dc ouncing
as a villain, — 'What ho! slave! Caliban' Thou earth,
thou!' and as he still lingers, muttering his refusal,
Prospero shouts, ' Come forth, I say ; conn . thou tor-
toise ! when?' In a milder mood he might have said,
* Come, thou snail ! ' expressing thereby the same idea
of tardy reluctant obedience, with equally little reference
to his form.

In reality though by some sealy or fin-like appen-
dages, the idea of a fish, or sea-monster, is suggested
to all, the form of Caliban is, nevertheless, essentially
human. In a fashion more characteristic of Milton's
than of Shakespeare's wonted figure of speech, this is
affirmed in language that no doubt purposely suggests
the opposite idea to the mind, where Prospero says : —

' Then was this island —
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born, — not honoured with
A human shape.'

The double bearing of this is singularly expressive :— save
for this son of Sycorax, the island was not honoured
with a human shape. And, having thus indicated that
his shape was human, by the use of the terms ' whelp '
and ' littered ' the brutish ideal is strongly impressed on

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T//B A:0NSTER CALIBAN.

the mind. But his strictly anthropomorphic character
is dehcately suggested in other ways. When Miranda
says of Ferdinand —

'This
Is the third man that e'er I saw, the first
That e'er I sigh'd for,'

she can only refer to her father and Caliban. In this the
poet purposely glances at the simplicity of the inex-
perienced maiden, to whom the repulsive monster had
hitherto been the sole ideal of manhood presented to her
mind, apart from the venerable Prosper©. How far he
falls short of all manly perfections is indicated imme-
diately afterwards in the contrast instituted between him
and Ferdinand : —

•Thou think'st there are no more such shapes as he,
Having seen but him and Caliban. Fooliih wench !
To the most of men this is a Caliban.
And they to him are angels.'

This is, of course, the purposed exaggeration of Prospero,
in his fear ' lest too light winning make the prize light.'
But so soon as Miranda has become thoroughly im-
pressed with the image of her new-found lover, with ' no
ambition to see a goodlier man,' she ceases to think of
Caliban as a being to be associated with him in common
manhood. When, accordingly, she responds to Ferdi-
nand's admiring exclamation —

'But you, O you,
So perfect and so peerless, are created
Of every creature's best,'

it is by a declaration which wholly ignores Caliban's
claims to rank in the same order of beings with those
among whom she had so recently classed him.

' I do not know
One of my sex ; no woman's face remember,

I ;

I ' .111
11 \

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

Save, fiom my glass, mine own; nor have I seen
Moie that 1 may call men, than you, good friend,
And my dear father.'

In this way the gradual expansion of the ideas of this
innocent maiden are traced by the most deHcatc indi-
cations : until ac length, when Alonzo and his company
are introduced into Prospero's cell, where Ferdinand and
Miranda are seated, playing at chess, she exclaims —

' Oh ! wonder !
How many goodly creatures are there here !
How beauteous mankind is ! O brave nev/ world
That lias such people iii't ! '

The development being thus completed, and the per-
fection of true manhood fairly presented to her eye and
mind, Caliban is then introduced, with the awe-struck
exclamation —

' O Setebos, these be brave spirits indeed ! '

and immediately thereafter we have the remark of
Antonio — ' One of them is a plain fish, and no doubt
marketable.' He is a 'thing of darkness,' as Prospero
calls him ; a being ' as disproportioned in his manners as
in his shape;' yet nevertheless so closely approximating,
in the main, to ordinary humanity, that Miranda had
associated him in her own mind, along with her father,
as ' honoured with a human shape.'

Again, we arc furnished with a tolerably definite clue
to the age which Caliban has attained at the date of his
introduction to our notice. Littered on the island soon
after the reputed arrival of Sycorax, we learn that that
malignant hag, unable to subdue the delicate Ariel to
the execution of her abhorred commands, imprisoned
him in the cloven pine, where he groaned out twelve
wretched years, till relieved from his torments by the art
of Prospero. Next, it appears from the discourse of her

ii4'

T//E MONSTER CALIBAN.

father to Miranda that she has grown up on that lonely
island for a Hke period. ' Twelve years since, Miranda,
thy father was the Duke of Milan, and a prince of
power.' But she was not then three years old, and so
the memory of that former state, and of the maidens
who tended her in her father's palace, has faded away,
' far off, and like a dream ; ' while the banished Duke,
' rapt in secret studies,' his library ' a dukedom
large enough,' had more and more perfected himself in
occult science, until he learns by its aid that now the
very crisis of their fates has come. Caliban is, there-
fore, to all appearaiice in his twenty-fifth year, as we
catch a first glimpse of this pre-Darwinian realisation of
the intermedi.ite link between brute and man. It seems
moreover to be implied that he has already passed his
maturity. At an earlier age than that at which man
is capable of self-support, the creature had been aban-
doned to the solitude of his island-home, and learned
with his long claws to dig for pig-nuts ; and now, says
Prospero, ' as with age his body uglier grows, so his
mind cankers.' We may conceive of the huge canine
teeth and prognathous jaws which in old age assume
such prominence in the higher quadrumana. Darwin
claims for the bonnet-monkey ' the forehead which
gives to man his noble and intellectual appearance ; '
and it is obvious that it was not wanting in Caliban : for
when he discovers the true vquality of the drunken fools
he has mistaken for gods, his remonstrance is, ' we shall
all be turned to apes with foreheads villainous low.'
Here then is the highest deveiopement of ' the beast
that want, discourse of reason.' He has attained to
all the maturity his nature admits of, and so is perfect
as the study of a living creature distinct from, yet next
in order below the level of humanity.

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

The being thus called into existence for the purposes
of dramatic art is a creation well meriting the thought-
ful study of the modern philosopher, whatever deduc-
tions he may have based on the hypotheses of recent
speculation. Caliban's is not a brutalised, but a natural
brute mind. He is a being in whom the moral in-
stincts of man have no part ; but also in whom the
degradation of savage humanity is equally wanting.
He is a novel anthropoid of a high type — such as on
the hypothesis o^ evolution must have existed inter-
mediately between the ape and man, — in whom some
spark of rational intelligence has been enkindled, under
the tutorship of one who has already mastered the
secrets of nature. We must not be betrayed into a too
literal intcrputation of the hyperboles of the wrathful
Duke of Milan. He is truly enough the ' freckled
whelp' whom Prospero has subdued to useful services, as
he might break in a wild colt, or r^ar a young wolf to
do his bidding, though in token of higher capacity he
has specially trained him to menial duties peculiar to
man. For not only does he 'fetch in our wood,' as
Prospero reminds his daughter, ' and serves in offices
that profit us,' but 'he does make our fire.'

No incident attending the discovery of the New World
is more significant than that of Columbus stationed on
the poop of the Santa Maria, his eye ranging along the
darkened horizon, when the sun had once more gone
down on the disappointed hopes of the voyagers.
Suddenly a light glimmered in the distance, once and
again reappeared to the eyes of Pedro Gutierrez and
others whom the great admiral summoned to catch this
gleam of realised hopes ; and then darkness and doubt
resumed their reign. But to Columbus all was light.
That feeble ray had told of the presence of the fire-

II „_

THE MONSTER C A LI HAN.

maker, man. The natural habits of Cahban, however,
are those of the denizen of the woods. We may conceive
of him like the pongoes of Mayombe, described by
Purchas, wh.. would come and sit by the travellers'
deserted ramp-fire, but had not sense enough to re-
plenish it with fuel. We have no reason to think of him
as naturally a cooking or fire-using animal ; though,
under the training of Prospero, he proves to be so far in
advance of the most highly developed anthropoid as to
be capable of learning the art of fire-making.

'We'll visit Caliban, my slave, who never yields us
kind answers,' Duke Prospero says to his daughter in the
second scene of ' The Tempest,' where they first appear,
and Caliban is introduced ; but the gentle Miranda
recalls with shuddering revulsion the brutal violence of
their strange servitor, and exclaims with unwonted
vehemence : ' 'Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on.'
But repulsive as he is, his services cannot be dispensed
with. ' As 'tis, we cannot miss him,' is Prospero's reply ;
and then, irritated alike by the sense of his obnoxious
instincts and reluctant service, he heaps opprobrious epi-
thets upon him : 'What, ho! slave! Caliban! thou earth,
thou ! Come forth, I say, thou tortoise ! ' and at length,
as he still lingers, muttering in his den, Prospero breaks
out in wrath — ' Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil
himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth 1 ' Schlegel
and Hazlitt accordingly speak in nearly the same terms
of ' ihe savage Caliban, half brute, half demon ; ' while
Gervinus — although elsewhere characterising him with
more appreciative acumen as ' an embryonic being de-
filed as it were by his earthly origin from the womb of
savage nature,' — does, with prosaic literalness, assume
that his mother was the witch Sycorax, and the devil
his father. Shakespeare assuredly aimed at the depiction

rilE MONSTER CALIBAN.

of no sucli foul ideal. It is the recluse student of nature's
mysteries, and i)Ot the poor island monster that is
characteristically revealed in such harsh vituperations.
Prospero habitually accomplishes his projects through
the agency of enforced service. He has usurped a power
over the spirits of air, as well as over this earth-born
slave ; and both are constrained to unwilling obedience.
Hence he has learned to exact and compel sewice to
the utmost ; to count only on the agency of enslaved
power : until an imperious habit disgu es the promptings
of a generous and kindly nature. With all his tender-
ness towards the daughter whose presence alone has
made life endurable to him, he flashes up in sudden ire
at the slightest interference with his plans for her ; as
when she interposes on behalf of Ferdinand, he exclaims
— ' Silence ! One word more shall make me chide thee, if
not hate thee.' He is indeed acting an assumed part,
'lest too light winning' should make the lover under-
value his prize ; but it is done in the imperious tone with
which habit has taught him to respond to the slightest
thwarting of his commands. This is still more apparent
in his dealings with the gentle Ariel, who owes to him
delivery from cruellest bondage. The relations subsisting
between them are indicated with rare art, and are as
tender as is compatible with beings of different elements.
The sylph is generally addressed in kindly admiring
terms, as ' my brave spirit,' ' my tricksy spirit,' ' my
delicate, my dainty Ariel.' Yet on the slightest ques-
tioning of Prospero's orders, he is told : ' Thou liest,
malignant thing 1 ' and on the mere show of murmuring
is threatened with durance more terrible than that from
which he has been set free.

In all this the characteristics of the magician are con-
sistently wrought out. According to the ideas of an age

^■nsi

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

■("'J

which still believed in magic, he has usurped the lord-
ship of nature, and subdued to his will the spirits of the
elements, by presumptuous, if not altogether sinful arts.
They are retained in subjection by the constant exercise
of this supernatural power, and yield him only the reluc-
tant obedience of slaves. This has to be borne in re-
membrance, if we would not misinterpret the ebullitions
of imperious harshness on the part of Prospero towards
beings who can only be retained in subjection by such
enforced mastery. That Caliban regards him with
as malignant a hatred as the caged and muzzled bear
may be supposed to entertain towards his keeper, is set
forth with clear consistency. Nor is it without abundant
reason. He is dealt with not merely as a ' lying slave,
whom stripes may move, not kindness ; ' but by his
master's magical art, the most familiar objects of nature
are made instruments of torture. They pinch, affright
him, pitch him into the mire, as deceptive fire-brands
mislead him in the dark, grind his joints with con-
vulsions, contort his sinews with cramp, and, as he says,

' For every trifle are they set upon me :
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me : then like hedgehogs, which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
Their pricks ai my footfall ; sometimes am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.'

To reconcile such harsh violence with the merciful
forgiving character of Prospero in his dealings with
those who, after having done him the cruellest wrongs,
are placed in his power, we have to conceive of the
outcast father and child compelled in their island
solitude to subdue a gorilla, or other brute menial,
to their service ; and, after in vain trying kindness,
driven in self-defence to protect themselves fron. its

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

8.^

brutal violence. The provocation which had roused the
unappeasable wrath of Miranda's father was indeed great;
but recognising the ' most poor credulous monster' as the
mere brute that he is, it involved no moral delinquency;
and therefore he is not to be regarded as devilish in
origin and inclinations, because he tells Stephano what
is literally true—' I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer,
that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.' He
accordingly invites the drunken butler to be his sup-
planter : —

* If thy greatness will
Revenge it on him,— for I know thou darest,—
Thou shalt be lord of it, and Til serve thee.'

He gloats on the idea of braining the tyrant, just as an
abused human slave might, and indeed many a time has
done.

' Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him
r the afternoon to sleep : there thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books ; or with a log
Batter his skull, or i.>aunch him with a stake.
Or cut his weazand with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command : they all do hate him
As rootedly as 1.'

All this would be hateful enough in a human being ; but
before wc pronounce Caliban a ' demi-devil,' we must
place alongside of him the butler Stephano, who, with
no other provocation than that of a base nature, and
with no wrongs whatever to avenge, is ready with
the response— 'Monster, I will kill this man; his
daughter and I will be king and queen, and Trinculo
and thyself shall be viceroys ; ' and so the poor servant
monster already fancies his slavery at an end, and ex-
clamis, ' Freedom, hey-day ! hey-day, freedom ! '

He who undertakes to subdue the wild nature of ape,

: G 2

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

leopard, wolf, or tiger, must not charge it with moral
delinquency when it yields to its native instincts. It
maybe, as modern s:ience would teach us, that our most
human characteristics are but developed instincts of the
brute ; for the churl

' Will let his coltish nature break
At seasons through the gilded pale.'

The savage, though familiarised with habits of civili-
sation, reverts with easy recoil to his barbarian licence ;
and the highest happiness which the tamed monster of
the island could conceive of, was once more to range in
unrestrained liberty, digging up the pig-nuts with his
long nails, or following the jay and the nimble marmoset
over rock and tree. But there is nothing malignant in
this ; and that nothing essentially repulsive is to be
assumed as natural to him is apparent from the very

invectives of Prospero : —

' Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness : I have used thee,
Filth as thou art, with human care ; and lodged thee
Ik mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honour of my child,'

Leaving aside, then, the exaggerations of the incensed
Prospero, which have their legitimate place in the de-
velopment of the drama, let us study, as far as may be,
the actual characteristics of the strange islander. His
story is told, briefly indeed, yet with adequate minute-
ness. Prospero retorts on him the recapitulation of
kindnesses which had been repaid with outrage never to
be forgiven : —

' Abhorred slave.
Which any print of goodness will not take,
Being capable of all ill I I pitied thee,
Took pains to tiake thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or otaer : when thou didst not, savage.
Know thine own meaning, but wouklst gabble like |

#;,

THE MONSTER CAI.lliA.W

«.^

A thing mobt brutish, I emlowed thy purposes
With words thnt made them known. Hut thy vile race,
Though !hou didst learn, had that in't which good natures
Could not abide to be with.'

In other words, he proved to be simply an animal,
actuated by the ordinary unrestrained passions and
desires which in the brute involve no moral evil, and
but for the presence of Miranda would have attracted
no special notice. Situated as he actually is, he is not
to be judged of wholly from the invectives of his master.
With brute instincts which have brought on him the
condign punishment of Prosper©, and a savage nature
which watches, like any wild creature under harsh
restraint, for escape and revenge, his feelings are never-
theless rather those of the captive bear than of 'one
who treasures up a wrong.' There is in him still a dog-
like aptitude for attachment, a craving even for the
mastership of some higher nature, and an appreciation of
kindness not unlike that of the domesticated dog, though
conjoined with faculties of intelligent enjoyment more
nearly approximating to humanity. When compelled
reluctantly to emerge from his den, he enters muttering
curses ; yet even they have a smack of nature in them.
They are in no ways devilish, but such as the wild
creature exposed to the elements may be supposed to
recognise as the blight and mildew with which Nature
gratifies her ill-will. He imprecates on his enslaver—

'As wicked dew as eer my mother brushed
With raven's feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both ! A south-west blow on ye
And blister you all o'er!'

Prosper© threatens him with cramps, side-stitches that
shall pen his breath up, urchins to prick him, and
pinching pains more stinging than the bees; but his

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

answer has no smack of ficncHshncss, though he docs
retort with bootless imprecations. He stoh'dly replies —

' I must eat my dinner.
This island's mine, by Sycorax my motlicr,
Which thou takcst from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me, and madcst much of me; woulJr^ give me
Water with berries in't ; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night ; and then I loved thee,
And shew'd thee all the qualities o' the isle.
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile ;
Cursed be I that did so ! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you I
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king ; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o' the island,'

Prospero replies to him as a creature ' whom stripes may
move, not kindness,' who had been treated companion-
ably, with human care, till his brute instincts compelled
the subjection of him to such restraint. He describes
the pity with which he at first regarded the poor monster,
whose brutish gabble he had trained to the intelligent
speech which is now used for curses. In all this do we
not realise the ideal anthropoid in the highest stage of
Simian evolution, stroked and made much of like a
favourite dog, fed with dainties, and at length taught to
frame his brute cries into words by which his wishes
could find intelligible utterance. The bigger and the
lesser light receive names, and are even traced, as we
may presume, to their origin. But the intellectual de-
velopment compasses, at the utmost, a very narrow
range ; and when the drunken Stephano plies him with
his bottle of sack, the dialogue runs in this characteristic
fashion : —

^ Stepb. How now, moon-calf? how does thino ague?
Cat, Hast thou not dropt from heaven ?

THE sMONSTER CAUliAN.

Steph. Out o' the moon, I do assure thcc : I was the man in the

moon, when time was.

Cal. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee,
My mistress shewed me thee, and thy dog, and thy Inish.

Steph. Come, swear to that ; kiss the book : I will furnish it anon
with new contents ; swear.

Trin. By this f^ood lifjht, this is a very shallow monster! I am afeard
of him I A very weak monster ! The man i" the moon I A most poor
credulous monster ! Well drawn, monster, in good sooth !

Cal. I'll shew thee every fertile inch o' the island ;
And I will kiss thy foot: 1 pr'ythee, be my j;od.'

But we presently see Caliban in another and wholly
different aspect. Like the domesticated animal, which
he really i.s, he has certain artificial habits and tastes
superinduced in him ; but whenever his natural instincts
reveal themselves we see neither a born devil, nor a be-
ing bearing any likeness to degraded savage humanity.
He is an animal at home among the sounds and scenes
of living nature. ' Pray you, tread softly, that the
blind mole may not hear a footfall,' is his exhorta-
tion to his drunken companions as they approach
the entrance of Prospero's cell. When Trinculo frets
him, his threatened revenge is, ' He .shall drink nought
but brine ; for Pll not show him where the quick freshes
are;' and he encourages his equally rude companion
with the assurance —

'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears ; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming.
The clouds, methought, would open, and shew rches
Ready to drop upon me ; that, when I vyaked,
I cried to dream again.'

To the drunken butler and his comrade, Caliban is ' a
most poor credulous monster ! a puppy-headed, scurvy.

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

abominable monster 1 a most ridiculous monster ! ' and
when, by their aid, he has drowned his tongue in sack,
he is no more to them than a debauched fish. But
Shakespeare has purposely placed the true anthropo-
morphoid alongside of these types of degraded humanity,
to shew the contrast between them. He is careful to
draw a wide and strongly-marked distinction between
the coarse prosaic brutal'ty of del^dsed human nature,
and the inferior, but in no wayi: degraded, brute nature
of Caliban. ' He is,' says Prospero, ' as disproportioned
in his manners as in his shape.' He had a<;snciated for
years in friendly dependence, lodged with Prospero in
his own cell ; for we have to remember that Miranda
was but three years old when her father took in h?-.d
the taming of the poor monster, and used him with
human care, until compelled to drive him forth to his
rocky prison. His narrow faculties have thus been
forced into strange development ; but though the
wrathful Prospero pronounces him a creature ' which any
print of goodness will not take, being capable of all ill,'
that is by no means the impression which the poet
designs to convey. Man, by reason of his higher nature
which invites him t*^ aspire, and his moral sense which
clearly presents to him the choice between good and
evil, is capable of a degradation beyond reach of the
brute. The very criminality which has so hardened
Prospero's heart against his poor slave, involves to him-
self no sense of moral wrong. 'O ho! O ho! would it had
been done ! ' i.-5 his retort to Prospero ; ' thou didst
prevent me ; I had peopled else this isle with Calibans.'
The distinction between the coarse sensuality of
degraded humanity, and this most original creation of
poetic fancy, with its gross brute-mind, its limited
faculties, its purely animal cravings and impulses, is

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

maintained throughout. The first scene opens with the

sailors, released from all ordinary deference and restraint

by the perils of the storm, shouting and blaspheming in

reckless desperation ; and no sooner are they ashore

than Caliban is brought into closest relations with the

still more worthless topers who win his admiration, till

experience teaches him —

' What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool ! '

The dog-like attachment which had drawn him to
Prospero, till harsh treatment and restraint eradicated
this feeling, and utterly alienated him from his first
master, is transferred to the next being who treats him
with any appearance of kindness. ' I'll shew thee every
fertile inch o' the island,' is the first form in which his
gratitude finds utterance ;

'I'll shew thee the best springs; I'll pluck thee berries;
I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.
A plague upon the tyrant that I serve !
I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,
Thou wondrous man.'

The drunken butler, with his bottle of sack, seems
to the poor monster to have dropped from heaven, or
rather from the moon, where once his mistress showed
him that favourite myth of old popular folk-lore, the
man-in-the-moon, with his dog and bush : and so he
fawns on him as a dog might on an old acquaintance.
' A most ridiculous monster,' thinks Trinculo, ' to make
a wonder of a poor drunkard ; ' but Caliban is ready to
lavish all his dog-like fidelity on his new-found master.

'I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;
..-„__. And I, with my long nails, will dig thee pig-nuts; ----- -

Shew thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

To clustering filberts; and sometimes I'll get tliee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?'

If we can conceive of a baboon endowed with speech,
and moved by gratitude, have we not here the very
ideas to which its nature would prompt it. It is a crea-
ture native to the rocks and the woods, at home in the
haunts of the jay and marmoset : a fellow-creature of
like nature and sympathies with themselves. The talk
of the ship's crew is not only coarse, but even what it is
customary to call brutal ; while that of Stephano and
Trinculo accords with their debased and besotted
humanity. Their language never assumes a rhythmical
structure, or rises to poetic thought. But Caliban is in
perfect harmony with the rhythm of the breezes and the
tides. His thoughts are essentially poetical, within the
range of his lower nature; and so his speech is, for the most
part, in verse. He has that poetry of the senses which
seems natural to his companionship with the creatures of
the forest and the seashore. Even his growl, as he retorts
impotent curses on the power that has enslaved him,
is rhythmical. Bogs, fens, and the infectious exhalations
that the sun sucks up, embody his ideas of evil ; and his
acute senses are chiefly at home with the dew, and the
fresh springs, the clustering filberts, the jay in his leafy
nest, or the blind mole in its burrow.

No being of all that people the Shakespearean drama
more thoroughly suggests the idea of a pure creation of
the poetic fancy than Caliban. He has a nature of his
own essentially distinct from the human beings with
whom he is brought in contact. He seems indeed the
half-human link between the brute and man ; ar d
realises, as lo degraded Bushman or Australian savage
can do, a ( mceivable intermediate stage of the anthro-
pomorphous existence, as far above the most highly

THE MONSTER CALIBAN.

organised ape as it falls short of rational humanity.
He excit'S a sympathy such as no degraded savage
could. We feel for the poor monster, so helplessly in
the power of the stern Prospero, as for some caged wild
beast pining in cruel captivity, and rejoice to think of
him at last free to range in harmless mastery over his
island solitude. He provokes no more jealousy as the
inheritor of Prospero's usurped lordship over his island
home than the caged bird which has escaped to the
free forest again. His is a type of development essen-
tially non-human, — though, for the purposes of the drama,
endued to an extent altogether beyond the highest at-
tainments of the civilised, domesticated animal, with
the exercise of reason and the use of language ; — a
conceivable civilisation such as would, to a certain
extent, run parallel to that of man, but could never
converge to a common centre.

CHAPTER VI.

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

' Titled with many a name, almighty lord of immortalb,
Zeus, ihou crown of creation, whose sway by law is directed,
Hail ! It is right and just for mortals thus to approach thee :
We are thy offspring. We alone, of thy varied dependents
Living and moving on earth, are gifted with speech to address thee.'

Hymn of Cleaiilhes to Zeus.

A PROPOSITION of no slight significance in the
argument for man's evolution from the brute is
that there is no evidence of his having been 'aboriginally
endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an
omnipotent God.' It seems more than doubtful, in the
process of developed ideas and beliefs assigned to him,
whether there is any room at a later stage for his
receiving such belitf as an ' endowment ' or a revelation.
If, as the whole line of argument assumes, the charactc r-
istics of humanity are no more than the developed
instincts of the brute, and all thai is highest in our
nature is but an evolution from the very lowest and
meanest phenomena of mere vitality, the absence of any
such ennobling belief in all the stages of life but the
latest, is inevitable. The growing difficulty, indeed, is
not so much to find man's place in nature, as to find
any place left for mind : either that of the Supreme
Omnipotence, or the immortal entity which it has been
habitual to conceive of as the body's guest.

It is not merely the pedigree of this highest verte-
brate animal, Man, which is undoubtingly traced back
to one of the lowest classes in the sub-kingdom of the
moUusca. His intellect, his conscience, and his religious

CA/.IBAiV, THE METAPIIYSICIA.Y.

beliefs arc but the latest ramifications of that primitive
Ascidian germ which clung to the rocks on the shores of
inconceivably ancient seas. Nor, indeed, must we think
of the Ascidian as of the primeval seed-vessel of animal
life, with all the possibilities of evolution embodied in it
in embryo. The pedigree has indeed been carried back
wondrous lengths ; but having got so far, why stop
there ? The distinctions between the moluscoid on its
tidal rock and the vegetable lichens beyond reach of the
waves, is triLing compared with later feats of eve. ition.
Life is present in both ; and if conscience, religion, the
apprehension of truth, the belief in God and immortality,
are all no more than developed or transformed animal
sensations ; and intellect is only the latest elaboration of
the perceptions of the senses : it need not surprise us that
inquiry has already been extended in search of relations
between the inorganic and the organic. On this new
hypothesis of evolution ' what a piece of work is man ! '
and as for God, it is hard to see what is left for Him to
do in the universe.

But if we are limited to the conception of our physical
organisation as the product of evolution, while the living
soul is still allowed its divine origin, then, so far as
creation is concerned, it matters little whether we are
assumed to be literally made of the dust of the ground,
or to have originated in Ascidian germs, and been at
latest evolved from apes. The one transformation seems
to be no less supernatural than the other. In so far as
it is strictly a physiological and anatomical question, let
physical science have untrammelled scope in deciding it ;
but when it becomes a psychical question, it is not as a
mere matter of sentiment that the mind revolts at a
theory of evolution which professes to recognise its own
emanation as no more than the accumulation of im-

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

pressions and sensations of the nervous organisation
gathered in the slow lapse of ages, until at last it has
culminated in a moral sense. Our belief in a great
First Cause is inextricably bound up with our belief
in the human soul : mind first, then matter. It is an
instinct of our being which arms us with patience
against a thousand ills which the brute escapes from,
because he 'wants discourse of reason,' and neither
'looks before nor after.' Hence it is that we now
turn with an altogether novel interest to Shakespeare's
unprejudiced realisation of what is conceivable as the
product of highest evolution in the brute.

But a living poet, of rare objective power, yet not un-
influenced by the spirit of his age, has aimed at carrying
us a step further in the comprehension of the ideal brute-
precursor, if not the progenitor, of man. Shakespeare
fashioned for us the ' beast Caliban ' in the sullenness of
his harsh enslavement, hankering after the fresh springs
and brine-pits ; or pining for the music of the winds as
he goes a-nesting, or the long wash of the billows while
he gathers the scamels from the rock, and chases the
nimble crabs when tides are low. The isle is full of
noises ; and though he has no linnet-note of his own,
nor any such powers as those by which, according to
Audubon, that Orpheus polyglotttts, the American mock-
ing-bird, puts to silence the Virginia nightingale and
other mortified songsters of the woods, yet the sounds
of nature hum welcomely about his ears, and soothe him
to sleep.

But it is not Caliban who sleeps, but Prospero
and Miranda : — slumbering in full confidence that he
drudges at their task; — while our other poet, .Robert
Browning, pictures the poor monster, constrained by the
very luxury of leisure snatched from toil, to give such

CALIBAN, THE METAPI/ySICIAN.

reasoning powers as are developed in him a wider sweep,
while he lets the rank tongue blossom into speech. The
opening picture is one of sheer animal enjoyment : —

' Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly, in the pit's much mire.
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin ;
And while he kicks both feet in the cool slush.
And feels about his spine small eft-things course.
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh ;
And while above his head a pompion-plant.
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye.
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard.
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch, and crunch :
He looks out e'er yon sea which sunbeams cross
And recross tili they weave a spider-web,
(Meshes of fire, some great fish breaks at times,)
And talks to his own self, howe'er he please,
Touching that other, whom his dam called God.'

In the traditions of that prehistoric island-time, before
Caliban had been endowed with speech, or Duke Pros-
pero had come to rule with supernatural authority over
the elemental powers, there had been impressed on that
dim mind some perception of a power called divine. The
modern students of man's place in nature have been
much perplexed on the question of religion as an as-
sumed attribute of man. Any doctrine of final causes is
not to be tolerated ; and yet that out of nothing some-
thing has come, with all the evolutions, physical and
and moral, of that entity, is a kind of positivism against
which reason rebels. It is legitimate, therefore, to in-
quire whether the idea of God is innate in the human
mind ; or if it be true, as has undoubtedly been affirmed
by travellers, missionaries, and scientific observers, that
there are races of men altogether devoid of religion. « If,'
says Sir John Lubbock, 'the mere sensation of fear, and
the recognition that there are probably other beings

I !

I i

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

more powerful than man, are sufficient alone to consti-
tute a religion, then we must, I think, admit that religion
is general to the human race.' But, in reality, he sees in
it no more than a child's dread of the darkness, which no
one regards as a token of religious belief; or if it be,
then the proof of the general existence of religion
founded on this sensation of fear, will no longer limit it
among the things peculiar to man. The feelings with
which a dog regards its master partake of the like
mingling of awe and dependent regard, as that which
constitutes much of human religious feeling ; and as for
rites and religious services, Sir John considers the baying
of a dog to the moon as much an act of worship as some
ceremonies which travellers have described as religious.

If it could be shown that there is actually present in
the savage mind such a mingled sense of awe and depen-
dence on an unseen power as the dog recognises in re-
lation to his master, there would remain no further room
for doubt as to the existence of religion in the case.
The late Dr. John Duncan, of New College, Edinburgh,
or Rabbi Duncan as he is more generally styled, when
bringing his acute metaphysical turn of speculation to
bear on his own favourite dog, came to a conclusion that
may seem wonderfully acceptable to the modern evolu-
tionist. He recognised in little Topsy, not only what
seemed to him many undeveloped elements of human
nature, but something resembling a conscience toward
man ; and he was wont to quote with favour the dictum
of an old Puritan divine, that ' Man is a little god unto
the lower animals ; their waiting eyes are fixed upon
him, and he giveth them their meat in due season.' As
to the state of mind of the dog when he bays the moon,
or its precise ideas in relation to that ' lesser light,' we
must await the revelations of some 'unusually wise'

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

canine philosopher. This, however, appears for our pre-
sent purpose, according to the revelations of the poets,
that there had been impressed on the dull brain of
Caliban some idea of a supernatural, though by no
means omnipotent power. Judging of supernal powers,
and the Divine attributes, solely by his own experiences,
the conclusions he arrives at are confused enough. He
has far-off remembrances ot Sycorax, terrible in her
sorceries, unmitigable in her rage ; one so strong that
she could control the moon, and command the ebb and
flow of the tides : but yet altogether beneficent in her
dealings with him. Very different are his perceptions
of another overruling power, the tyrant Prospero, who,
as he says, ' by sorcery got this isle, from me he got it,'
and who continues to the present hour to manifest his
omnipotence in very terrible judgments for every trifle.
So far as Caliban's experiences went, this abhorred
hag, the worker of sorceries too terrible for human
utterance, was, according to his crude Manichean creed,
the representative of beneficent superhuman power ;
while the sage Prospero — who with his nobler reason
against his fury takes part, and recognises a choicer
action in virtue than in vengeance, — appeared to him
a malignant and wholly evil power.

But besides those two potencies, of both of which
Caliban has had actual sight and experience, there is
that dam's god, Setebos. Prospero was not only a super-
human power, but to him v/as all powerful. To resist
his will was impossible.

' His art is of such power,
It would control my clam's god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him,'

Yet that is a power not wholly mysterious. Caliban
has learned to refer it, not to him, but to his art ; and

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

believes that, without his books he would not have one
spirit to command : ' They all do hate him as rootcdly
as I.' But these books are the symbols, as well as the
instruments of moral supremacy. So long as he holds
these, the spirits may hate, but, like himself, they must
tremble and obey ; for his power is such that it can con-
trol even the divine Setebos,— a very puzzling state of
things for such a mind to ponder over. In early days,
when Prospero stroked and made much of his poor slave,
Caliban yielded him a dog-like fidelity, and showed him
all the qualities of the island. Now that their relations
have so wholly changed, he hates him according to the
hate of ' a thing most brutish,' and feels neither awe nor
compunction, but only pleasure, at the idea that Stephano
should , ..... ,

' vV ith a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a sta'ce,
Or cut his wcazand with his knife.'

Setebos is a wholly different being from this : an invisi-
ble and very vague divinity, on whom no such attempts
are possible, inferior though he is in some sense to the
artful Prospero. Nevertheless it is inevitable that when
Caliban takes to thinking of that other whom his dam
called God, he should, like metaphysicians of more
matured powers and higher advantages, realise little
more than a being ' altogether such an one as himself.'
Aiid yet his ideas are confused and obscure, as is inevitable
in the best attempts at reasoning on such supra-physical
matters. Prospero's power is a very tangible reality to
him : a power that admitted of no thought of resistance
by its most unwilling slave ; and so he doubted not it
could make a vassal of Setebos as well as of his poor
self. But in these puzzlings of his, which the poet
Browning records for us, over the origin of his little
island-world, and the bigger and the less light that burn

C A Lin AN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

by clay and night for its special benefit, the vague un-
seen Setcbos seems fitter creator than the magician ;
though as for the stars, they may be 'the poetry of
heaven;' but in his present prosaic mood they do not
seem much to concern him or his island, and so he
fancies they may have come otherwise, it not being
needful for the poor puzzled philosopher to say how.

•Setcbos, Setebos, and Setel)Os I
Thinketh He dvvelleth i' the cold o' the moon.
Thinkcth He made it, with the sun to match.
But not the stars ; the stars came ctherwise ;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that :
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon.
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same,'

If Setebos does indeed dwell in the cold moon, then
Caliban, to whom cold is very unwelcome, can con-
ceive of how such creation might come of the very
restlessness of being ill at ease. The cold o' the moon
is his dwelling-place. He cannot change his cold, nor
cure its ache; and so, in an uneasy way, he betakes
himself to making clouds, meteors, the sun itself, to
match his moon. For has not Caliban, as he sprawled
in the heat of the day, on the breezy rocks that over-
look the strand,

'Spied an ''cy fish
That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived.
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O' the lazy sea her stream t'lrusts far amid,
A crystal spike 'twixt two warm waiis of wave ;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o* the sun,)
Flounced back from bliss she was not bom to breathe.
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike.'

And so, judging accordingly — and like more learned
philosophers sometimes mistaking deduction for induc-

H 2

lOO

C A LI HAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

tion, — Caliban surmises that he, in some such mood,
made the sun, this isle, and so much else : fowl, beast,
and creeping thing : —

* Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech ;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam.
That floats and feeds ; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white- wedge eye
By moonlight ; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole — He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?'

But our modern poet has other purposes than merely
to ingraft some island-details on that pure creative
conception in which the genius of Shakespeare has
revealed its mastery. If not metaphysical, like poor
Caliban, he at any rate has Bridgewater philosophers,
metaphysical realists, theologians — Calvinistic and anti-
Calvinistic, — all in view. Setebos, the divine power in
the island mythology — great First Cause, if not infinite
originator, — is being comprehended by this very finite
metaphysician. For instead of contentedly enjoying
his comfortable sprawl in the mire, now that the heat
of the day is at its best : Caliban suddenly finds him-
self involved in all the subtleties of the Ego and
Non-ego, and much else of a like kind, with results very
much akin to the experiences of those whom Milton
describes as retiring apart from their fellows who sang
the songs of a lost heaven, and there they

'Reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate ;
Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute ;
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then."

The reasoning, though pronounced ' vain wisdom all, and

CA/JIiAJV, THE METAPHYSICIA/V.

lOI

false philosophy,' may have suited metaphysical devils;
but it must be owned that Caliban, as the representative
missing' link — no 'bun devil,' in spite of Prospero's
imprecations, but oiJy a poor half-witted brute, — gets
terribly out of his depth. The modern searchers into
the origin of man, and of his civilisation, marshal an
imposing array of witnesses to the existence of tribes of
men wholly destitute of any trace of religion. Some of
their evidence is more than doubtful. We have only to
• remember one memorable example, to understand how
men apply their own standards of religion to test its
existence amongst others.

In 1617, Dr. Laud, then Archdeacon of Huntingdon,
paid his first visit to Presbyterian Scotland, as chap-
lain to King James ; and finding there no such forms,
ceremonies, or artistically-devised ritual as constituted
to his mind the very essence of worship, he pro-
nounced with grief of heart that there was ' no religion
at all, that he could see ! ' We will pit Dr. Laud
against the most reliable witnesses of the Evolutionists,
as a trained expert in the discernment of visible re-
ligions ; and yet other very trustworthy authorities
seem to indicate that, in Scotland in that year, 161 7,
and in subsequent years, the Scots really had some sort
of thing deserving the name of religion, though Dr.
Land could nor see it.

Among savages religion is not a thing to be talked
of. Gods, manitous, spirits, the dead, are not to be
named, save under the extremest urgency. The mere
wayfaring traveller's report is valueless. The missionary
has repeatedly found that he has not only used in his
teaching, but given a place in his native version of the
Scriptures, to religious terms that he has wholly mis-
applied. The ideas themselves are undefined, and

lOZ

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

are apt to elude the questioner altogether, when he
insists on a definition. We have ourselves tried, in
converse with the Indians of North America, to get at
their ideas on much simpler things than God, creation,
free-will, cr the belief in a future life ; and found it
no easy matter to get them to entertain questions
foreign to their ordinary current of thought. We were
told by a Christian missionary who had laboured for
years among the Chippeway Indians, preaching to
them at first with the aid of a native interpreter, that
he was shocked, when at a later date he listened to
similar renderings of a young missionary's address into
the language now familiar to him, to discover that
nearly all the ideas most essential to the doctrines
they sought to incu'cate were loat in the process. The
interpreter translated them into the pagan notions
of the tribe, and so the Christian element was well-
nigh eliminated, while the preacher complacently
waited for the fruits of the seed he fancied to have
been sown.

It is necessary to know what shape the ideas of the
supernatural have assumed to the savage mind, before
it can be appealed to in any intelligible language.
The difficulty indeed may be tested by trying to ob-
tain an intelligent definition of an over-ruling provi-
dence from the ordinary untutored mind. Put, for ex-
ample, to the English peasant, unaccustomed to abstract
thought, some of the questions on election, effectual
calling, and the like points of Calvinistic theology, con-
tained in " The Shorter Catechism " prepared by the
Westminster divines for the use of children. You are
speaking his own language, and have a good many
ideas in common ; yet the answers will be vague and
intangible enough. They may, however, help us to

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

J 03

understand how the savapje mind may be interrogated
in reference to its ideas of God, religion, a future state,
creation, 'ife, death, and much else, with results exceed-
ingly misleading and deceptive.

But however we may estimate the bearings of the
evidence adduced, there is something very touching in
the first narrative quoted by Sir John Lubbock in
proof of the total absence of religious belief in the
earlier savage stage. M. Bik is the authority ; and
his subject is the Arafura of one of the islands lying be-
tween New Guinea and North Australia. ' It is evident,'
says the narrator, 'that the Arafuras of Vorkay possess
no religion whatever. Of the immortality of the soul
they have not the least conception. To all my In-
quiries on this subject they answered, 'No Arafura has
ever returned to us after death, therefore we know
nothing of a future state ; and this is the first time we
have heard of it.' The questioner was a passing
voyager of the Dourga, speaking through an interpre-
ter, and as ignorant of the Arafura ideas of the soul,
the future state, and other matters referred to, as if
some German Kant were to demand of an English
peasant concerning his belief in the empirical reality
and transcendental ideality of space and time; or required
from him a definition of his ideas of a priori intuition.
HiS answer would be very much after the fashion of
the Arafura, when desired to state his notions as to
the creation of the world. 'None of us are aware of
this ; we have never heard anything about it, and
therefore do not know who has done it all.' The
German philosopher might report very truly that he could
not discover in the English peasant any notion of space
or time, or indeed any innate ideas at all ; and yet he
would convey a very false impression of the peasant's

;\f

104

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

actual notions and beliefs. But M. Bik thus proceeds :
* To convince myself more fully respecting their want of
knowledge of a Supreme Being, I demanded of them
on what they called for help in their need, when, far
from their homes, engaged in the trepang fishery, their
vessels were overtaken by violent tempests, and no
human power could save them, their wives and chil-
dren, from destruction. The eldest among them, after
having consulted the others, answered that they knew
not on whom they could call for assistance, but begged
me, if I knew, to be so good as to inform them.'

This is very tender and touching in its childlike
simplicity ; but the mode adopted by the voyager to
convince himself of the point aimed at was exceed-
ingly deceptive. They no more prayed to God, or any
unseen power, after his fashion, than the Presbyterians
of Scotland did after the high Anglican fashion of
Laud. But this by no means proves that they had
no faith in the supernatural, no altar, like that of the
Athenians, to the unknown God. As to the poor
Arafuras' idea of a divine refuge in their hour of need,
the savage mind is slow indeed to realise the idea of
beneficent power. In truth the strongest argument
against the evolution of the Christian religion from
our own sensations and perceptions, is that it so utterly
transcends the purest aspirations of the human soul,
as to make it vain to imagine they could ever beget
a ' Sermon on the Mount.' ' An eye for an eye, and
a tooth for a tooth,' seems thoroughly human ; but
'Blessed are the merciful,' 'the pure in heart,' and all
the maxims of the Great Teacher, partake not of the
humanity either of the first or of this nineteenth century.

An Indian chief on Lake Superior explained to my-
self the difference between the white man's God and

"J(l'lii«w,fB'_B.

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

'05

his own Manitou, in this simple way : ' When the lake
rises in a storm, and the north-west wind howls
through the trees, and lightnings kindle them, we
know that is the great Manitou, and we are afraid,
and hide ourselves. We offer him much tobacco ; we
try to avert his anger ; and are at peace again when
he is gone. As for you white men, you call on your
God, and want him to come to you. Are you not
afraid of him ? ' The idea of the All-powerful being
also the All-loving pertains alone to Christianity. The
savage's conception of divine power in any sense is
necessarily associated with the only moral qualities
actively present in himself; and as the strong savage
tyrannises over the weak, and is very indifferent to his
privations, his sufferings, or wrongs, he finds it hard
to realise any idea of omnipotence dissociated from
the disposition to abuse such power. The moral sense
is weak, the passions are strong ; and love, generosity,
or any golden rule of charity and beneficence is apt
to appear to him an evidence of weakness rather than
an expression of power. ' The mighty God, even the
Lord hath spoken, and called the earth from the
rising of the sun unto the going down thereof. Out
of Zion, the perfection q{ beauty, God hath shined.'
So says the inspired Hebrew poet. But when, as with
the poor Arafura savage, 'God hath not spoken a
single word ;' and he has been left to his own heart's
devices, to turn his strength to cruelty, then the utter-
ance might follow from the same song of praise, ' These
things hast thou done, and I kept silence. Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as
thy.'ielf.'

Another French traveller, M. Arbrousset, gives a
very different account of the searching of Sekesa, an

io6

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

intelligent Kaffir, to find out God, while he still dwelt
a lonely savage among the wilds of southern Africa.
' Your tidings,' he said, ' are what I want ; and I was
seeking before I knew you, as you shall hear. Twelve
years ago, I went to feed my flocks. The weather
was hazy. I sat down upon a rock and asked myself
sorrowful questions : yes, sorrowful, because I was un-
able to answer them. " Who has touched the stars
with his hands ? on what pillars do they rest .-' " I
asked myself. " The waters are never weary ; they
know no other law than to flow without ceasing from
morning till night, and from night till morning : but
where do they stop, and who makes them flow thus }
The clouds also come and go, and burst in water over
the earth. Whence come they ? Who sends them ?
The diviners certainly do not give us rain; for how
could they do it ? And why do I not see them with
my own eyes when they go up to heaven to fetch it ? " '.
And so the Kaffir details his vain questionings, until
he says, 'Then I buried my face in my hands.' Sir
John Lubbock says of this ; it is an exceptional case.
In reality the question rises to our mind in relation to
it, as to many similar reports of savage utterances :
How much of this is, however undesignedly, due to the
questioner ? Our own experience with the American
savage is that it is only by slow and careful observation
of his spontaneous utterances that any conception of his
real beliefs can be arrived at. By means of leading
questions you may get any answers you like. As a rule,
the savage will reply in the way he thinks you desire,
however wide of th i truth. It is difficult to evade some
suspicion that the thoughts which troubled Sekesa's
mind have acquired some of their definiteness in trans-
mission through that of the narrator.

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

107

The poet Browning, reasoning as his fashion is, as
it were for the time being with the very brain and
faculties of his subject, thus sets CaHbun to work out
his ideal of a Supreme Being, conceivable only as
powerful, by no means as loving : —

' He made all these, and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite : how else ?

He could not, Himself, make a second self

But did in envy, listlessness, or sport,

Make what Himself would fain, in a manner, be —

Look now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash,

Add honeycomb and pods, I hive perceived,

Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,—

Then when froth rises bladdery, drink up all.

Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain ;

And throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme.

And wanton, wishing I were born a bird.

Put case, unable to be what I wish,

I yet could make a live bird out of clay ;

Would not I take clay, pinch my Caliban

Able to fly?— lor, there, see, he hath wings.

And great comb like the hoopoe's to admire,

And there a sting to do his foes offence.

There, and I will that he begin to live.

Fly to yon rock-top, nip me off the horns

Of grigs high up that make the merry din,

Saucy, through thin-veined wings, and mind me not.

In which feat, if his leg snapped, brittle clay,

And he lay stupid-l^ke,— why, I should laugh;

And, if he, spying me, should fall to weep.

Beseech me to be good, repair his wrong.

Bid his poor leg smart less, or grow again —

Well, as the chance were, this might take, or else

Not take my fancy: I might hear his cry,

And give the manikin three legs for his one,

Or pluck the other off, leave him like an egg.

And lessoned he was mine, and merely clay.

Were this no pleasure, lying in the thyme.

Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,

Making and marring clay at will?' ;J ' 7 T ', f T

The later poet, it is obvious, has here lost sight of
the ideal of man's brute-progenitor,— of the dimly

io8

CALIBAI^, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

reasoning chimpanzee or baboon, — and is rather be-
thinking himself of greatly more modern controver-
sialists. He is no longer with the Athenian free-
thinker on Mars' Hill ; but among the proselytes of
Rome, to whose questionings Paul responds in inter-
rogatives, 'O man, who art thou that repliest against
God ? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed
it, Why hast thou formed me thus? Hath not the
potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make
one vessel unto honour and another to dishonour ? '
Caliban, having no conception of mercy, self-sacrificing
love, generosity, or other motives which exercise a
sway over human action, and dimly reflect the highest
attributes of God,

' Thinketh such shows nor right nor wrong in Him,
Noi kinu, nor cruel: He is strong, and Lord.
*Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs,
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
'Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-fust.
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
'Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the pile, one pincer twisted off;
'Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, I do : so Re.'

But that Setebos, the Creator, is capable of jealousy,
envy of his own handiwork if it should seem to rival
himself, is altogether natural to the mind of Caliban, —
the metaphysical Caliban of the later poet. He has,
himself, got to the length of creating ; is a tool-using
animal; and does not see why, since Prospero transformed
his own brutish gabble into speech, and ' endowed his
purposes with words that made them known,' it might not
be possible to render other noises tractable and respon-
sive to the volitions of the utterer : say, for example,

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

109

to make this pipe of his, made of the pithless elder-
joint, prattle its own thoughts, instead of only screaming
one note when it is blown through. ' Will you play on
this pipe ? ' says the Prince of Denmark to Rosencrantz,
when the courtier, as he perceives, is attempting to play
on himself, though, as he owns, he knows not a touch of
the little pipe. ' Why, look you now, how unworthy a
thing you make of me ! You would play upon me ; you
would seem to know my stops ; you would pluck out
the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my
lowest note to the top of my compass : and there is
much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet
cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood ! do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe .-' '

But then, Hamlet was no ordinary human pipe. The
modern poet has given us a sort of anthropoid Hamlet,
in his version of Caliban dealing with the natural
theology of the island. Setebos, as the poor monster
reasons to himself, may be good in the main ; — goodness
mainly meaning with him, as with the Indian savage,
unharmfulness. He may be placable, if his mind and
ways were guessed aright : but then, if he takes to
creating, the works of his hands must not presume to do
anything unless through him. Suppose this pipe of
Caliban's own manufacture, with which he can imitate
the scream of the jay, were to take to blowing itself,
and to boasting of its blowing, and of all the results of
its music, as wholly its own : why then Caliban could
endure no such presumption, and would crush it under
foot. And if I, then so He ; — so Setebos, the Creator,
with his creatures. Thus reasons Caliban : —

' Hath cut a pipe of pithless elder-joint
That, blown through, gives exact the screana o' the jay
When from her wing you twitch the feathers blue;

I lO

CA/./nAy, THE METAPHYSICTAN.

Sound this, and little birds that hate the jay

'■"lock within stone's throw, fjlad their foe is hurt:

Put case such pipe could prattle and boast forsooth,

"I catch the birds, I am the crafty thing,

I make the cry my maker cannot make

With his great round mouth : he must blow through mine ! "

Would not I smash it with my foot ? '

The self-made god, if it be fancy-wrought, and not
carven of wood or stone, must take its pattern and
compass from the conceiving mind. Under a process
of evolution which begets religious reverence and wor-
ship out of developed perceptions and sensations, the
imagined deity will grow with the imagining devotee ;
but it must derive all its attributes from him. The self-
conceived God of the Arafura or Kaffir savage, will
therefore be altogether such an one as himself, and can
no more get beyond the mental conception of its
originator than the quart can be contained in a pint
measure. It is unquestionable that the divine ideal of
thr savage very frequently presents just such character-
istics. It is hard indeed to recover any trace of an in-
stinctive consciousness of God, or any clear realisation of
immortality ; whatever we may make of his belief in an
hereafter. In reality it is scarcely possible to formulate
the dimly conceived ideas of the savage mind on such
subjects. With man far above the savage state the inspira-
tions of conscience and religious reverence are not easily
reducible to written terms. They are indeed apt, not
only to elude the formulist, but actually to disappear
with the effort : as the synthetic processes of the poet's
fancy are incompatible with the anatomisings of the
critic. But if there be a human soul, distinct from the
mere animal life ; and if there be also, as we believe, a
wholly different God, for rudest savage as for civilised
man, revealing Himself in the lilies of the field, in the

CALIBAN, THE METArilYSICIAN.

1 1

fowls of the air, in the stars of night ; taking care of the
sparrow, numbering the very hairs of our head; not very
far from every one of us:— then it may be possible for
man, even in a ruder state than the Kaffir Sekesa, dimly
to conceive of that unknown God, whom Paul found the
Athenians ignorantly worshipping : ' God that made the
world and all things therein, the Lord of heaven and
earth, who giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.'

The religion of the old Greek had unquestionably
more to do with the .nesthetic faculty than the moral
sense. His worship, to a large extent, addressed the
sensuous emotions, and deceived himself, as fine ritual
and solemn harmonies are apt to do, by affecting the
emotional sensibilities alone. But this, and much else
by which morality and religion were kept apart, belong
to the evolutions of late ages. The traces of an under-
lying current of belief in something greatly more spiritual
than the Zeus of his poetical mythology, is apparent in
many allusions ; though too frequently this supreme om-
nipresence seemed to the Greek only an omnipotent, un-
approachable, inexorable fate : ruler over gods and men,
destined survivor of Olympus even more than of earth ;
or as Caliban, in the dim searchings after a great First
Cause, which belong to his later metaphysical stage,
defines it — 'the something over Setebos.' For, as he
reasons, — .

•There may be something quiet o'er His head,
Out of His reach, that feels nor joy nor grief,
Since both derive from weakness in some way.
I joy because the quails come ; would not joy •

Could I bring quails here when I have a mind:
* This Quiet, all it hath a mind to, doth.
---,, 'Esteemeth stars the outposts of its couch, - ^ ^

But never spends much thought nor care that way.
It may look up, work up,— the worse for those .~-^- -— -~
It works on! 'Careth but for Setebos

112

CALIBAN, 7I1E METAFIIYSICIAN.

The many handed as a cuttle-fish,

Who, making Himself feared through what He does,

Looks up, first, and perceives He cannot soar

To what is quiet and hath happy life ;

Next looks down here, and out of very spite

Makes this a bauhle-world to ape yon real,

These good things lu match ihose £»s hips do grapes.

'Tis solace making baubles, ay, and iport.'

For Caliban himself lately peeping, eyed Prospcro at
his magic books ; and, vexed at the sight, stitched him-
self a make-believe magic book of leaves, scrawled
thereon meaningless characters, portentous enough ac-
cording to his wish ; peeled for himself a wand, robed
himself in skin of spotted oncelot, and tried to fancy
himself Prospero. He has his tamed sleek ounce, which
he makes cower, crouch, and mind his eye ; he keeps
his Ariel too, a tall pouch-bill crane, which at his
word will go wade for fish and straight disgorge ; and,
to complete this realisation of being himself a lordly
Prospero, he has got

* Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared.
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame.
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o' the rock, and calls him Caliban ;
A bitter heart, that bides its time and bites.
'Plays thus at being Prosper in a way.'

In many respects he seems to see a likeness to his own
ways in the doings of the invisible power Setebos, or
the something over Setebos. But, alas 1 if He has any
favouring leanings, they are not towards him.

' He is terrible : watch His feats in proof I
One hurricane will spoil six good months' hope.
He hath a spite against me, that I know,
Just as he favours Prosper, who knows why?
So it is, all the same, as well I find.

'Wove wattles half the winter, fenced them firm . -■ --

With stone and stake, to stop she-tortoises
Crawling to lay their eggs here: well, one wave, - - - •

CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN.

Feeling the foot of Him upon its neck,

Gaped as a snake docs, lolled out its large tongue.

And licked the whole labour flat : so much for spite.

'Dug up a newt He may have envied once

And turned to stone, shut up inside a stone.

Please Ilim, and hinder this? — What Prosper does?

Aha, if He would tell me howl Not He! '

So Caliban proceeds, reasoning in his obscure, con-
fused way : not, however, as Shakespeare's, but wholly as
Browning's Caliban. For he is no longer the interme-
diate, half-brute, missing link ' that wants discourse of
reason,' but the human savage, grovelling before the
Manitou of his own conception ; betaking himself even
to burnt sacrifices to appease this unseen Setebos,
and ward off His envy, hoping the while that, some
day, that other than Setebos may conquer Him ; or,
likelier still, that He may grow decrepit, doze, and
die. But at this stage the clouds gather, the wind
rises to a hurricane,

* Crickets stop hissing ; not a bird — or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all !
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze — *

A tree's head snaps — and there, there, there, there, there.
His thunder follows! Fool, to gibe at Him.*

Like the old Indian of Lake Superior, he hears the
voice of God only in the violence and the terrors of
nature ; and, like the first conscious offenders, when
they heard, not the tempest and the whirlwind, but
the still small voice among the trees of the garden,
he is afraid. The evolution is, in truth, altogether
too complete. This is no partially- developed irra-
tional anthropoid, but man as he is to be met with
in many a stage of mental progression far above the
rude savage. :.„.u._:-^ -.:_.:_ '- -~- --

CHAPTER VII.

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

' How perplext

Grows belief!
Well, this clay-cold clod

Was man's heart.
Crumble it — and what comes next ?

Is it God ? ' — Browning.

ONE more idea, very foreign to anything pertaining
to the brute-mind, presents itself, in modified evo-
lution, to the Caliban of the later poet. Shakespeare's
Caliban has his conception of death in its purely de-
structive form ; but not greatly differing, except in its
definiteness, from that of the ravening beast. When
Trinculo mocks him, he proposes at once that Stephano
shall ' bite him to death ;' and when, in answer to the
question 'Wilt thou destroy him, then?' Stephano pro-
mises, on his honour, that the tyrant Prospero shall be
brained, Caliban is transported with joy. But in all this
death is no more t j him than to the wolf or the tiger,
when it wrathfully makes an end of its foe, though the
desire for it has something of the human in its treasured
craving for revenge.

A dog is very capable of just such hatred, under
similar provocation ; and its revenge, if unchecked,
will not stop short of death. But the metaphysical
island-monster of the modern poet gets greatly nearer
to civilised humanity in his reasonings on the mystery
of death. He does not indeed clearly realise the

CAUBAN, THE rilEOLOGlAM.

•«5

univcrs.ility of this inevitable fate. For, looking on
Setcbos as a being not only terrible, but malevolent ;
as a favourer of Prospero, and having a spite at him-
self: he wistfully longs that it were possible to learn
how to propitiate this implacable power, or get beyond

his reach : —

' Discover how, or die I
All need not die, for of the things o' the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees ;
Those at His mercy, — why they please Him most
When . . when . . well, never try the same way twice I
Repeat what act has plcase<l, He may grow wroth,
You must not know Mis ways, and play Him off,
Sure of the issue. 'Doth the like himself:
'Spareth a squirrel that it nothing fears.
But steals the nut from underneath my thumb,
And when I threat, bites stoutly in defence ;
'Spareth an urchin that, contrariwise.
Curls up into a ball, pretending death
For fright at my approach : the two ways please.
But what would move my cholcr more than this.
That either creature counted on its life
To-morrow and next day, and all days to come,
Saying, forsooth, in the inmost of its heart,
" Because he did so yesterday with me,
And otherwise with such another brute.
So must he do henceforth and always." — Ay?
'Would teach the reasoning couple what " must " means I
'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord ? So He.'

Caliban is thus, in this little island-world — over which,
but for Prospero, he would be absolute lord, pos-
sessed of dominion over every living thing, — the
conscious embodiment of an omnipotence unchecked
by any beneficent attribute ; and he realises accord-
ingly how terrible such a God is, when he conceives
of himself as subject to just such power, Setebos or
other. He can himself crush out the life of the
squirrel or urchin, whenever it pleases him to do so ;
and it causes him no compunction that they ' are as

I 2

ii6

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

water spilt upon the ground, which cannot be gathered
up again.' He does according to his will with all
beneath Mm, reckless and unsympathetic as a blind
remorseless late. But if it please him to spare, then
he sees nothing to prevent perpetual life. Life, in
fact, is less of a mystery than death, except when pro-
duced by violence : as at his own pleasure it often is.
' All need not die ;' in fact, only a few are actually
brought within his own reach. But it is himself, not
them, he cares for ; and for himself the outlook is
gloomy enough, since the Setebos, his sole providence,
is altogether such a one as himself — excepting only
in this terrible absolutism of power : aid so he

• Conceiveth all things will continue thus,
And we shall have lo live in fear of Him
So long as He lives, keeps His strength : no change,
If He have clone His best, make no new world
To please Him more, so leave off watching this, —
If He surprise not even the Quiet's self
Some strange day,— or, suppose, grow into it
As grubs t,row butterflies: else, here are we,
And there is He, and nowhere help at all.'

Here it must be confessed that Caliban, as the
mere anthropoid, the brute-progenitor of man, and
therefore the inferior of the lowest savage, is terribly
out of his depth ; for, indeed, the poet-resuscitator
has revivified him for wholly different purposes than his
first creator had in view. There is something of the
inconsequential simplicity that might be conceived of
in the deductions of the irrational being in such rea-
soning as this : —

' All need not die, for of the things o* the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees ; '

and so there may be some way for us, too, to escape
out of reach of S^^ebos. Yet the reasoning is prob-
ably less simple than that of many a savage philosopher

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

117

of modern Pacific islands. Get beyond reach of this
terrible Setebos by such very simple processes as the
urchin or the squirrel at times eludes himself, or as
those of strongest wing flee afar, escaping altogether
from that island-microcosm which is the only world
he knows of outside of the moon : this — or else
things as they are ; for so far as he can see, all
things remain, and will continue so.

The parable of the poet is not of difficult inter-
pretation. The island and its puzzled philosopher
deal with a condition of things in which the latest
products of evolution have a personal int^^est, and
from which reasoners of strongest flight have failed
to effect their escape. This little island-world of ours,
between the two illimitable oceans of an unbeginning
and unending time, seems very unchangeable to the
view of its ephcmeron. He can conceive of no apter
figure of stability than the everlasting hills. ' Since
our fathers fei: asleep, all things continue as they
were from the beginning :' so reasons he. But it
lies in the nature of things that reasoning beings
learn to accumulate experience, to add what our
fathers observed before they ' fell asleep' to what we
ourselves perceive : and we begin to realise the fact
that the hills are no more everlasting than the clouds or
the waves. At the bottom of the ocean lie the moun-
tains of former ages ; on the summits of our Andes
and Himalayas are the sands of ancient ocean-beds ;
and the mummied Pharaohs tliat ruled over ichthian
or saurian worlds, when the foundations of those
pyramids were laid, lie sepulchred there in the rocky
matrix, like the island-newt that Setebos envied once,
and turned to stone. But all this necessarily lies out-
side of Caliban's philosophy. He is no link in a

ii8

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

chain of accumulated knowledge and experience, what-
ever other link he may supply : and so he can but
reason from what he knows.

Time is the grand factor in all theories of progressive
change or evolution. The universe is but an aggre-
gate of elements assuming ever new forms, in endless
but not lawless change. But for the reign of law,
indeed, there would seem to some to be no con-
trolling or overruling power. And yet the idea of
law without lawgiver or administrator, is one of those
legal fictions requiring something vastly beyond the
rationality of a Caliban to conceive. This, however, 5.-.
certain, that the grand revolutions in physical geo-
graphy which reveal themselves by such manifest
chroniclings of process and result, are, for the most
part, no more than the products of forces still at
work. This is the key-note of modern geology ; and
not less so of the newer anthropology. Given a
cumulative change — depression or elevation, degrada-
tion or evolution, — no matter how slight, how slow,
how nearly imperceptible it may seem : if the one
element of time be unlimited, it will suffice to rebuild
a cosmos out of chaos, to stop the clock-work of the
universe, or reorganise the heavens under conditions
wholly new. But the change must be continuously
progressive. A mere pendulum-motion, an ever-com-
pensating ebb and flow, can lead to no gradual un-
folding or maturing, but only to stability as the pro-
duct of ceaseless change. The geologist has his one
planet, ever changing, on which

' The giant ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make, and break, and work their will.'

To the naturalist, race is a unit, on which he was

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

119

long content to trace the influences of time and change.
But now his aggressive philosophy would comprehend
the whole living catena, from the protozoic dawn till
yesterday, as one ever-lengthening but unbroken chain.
The death of countless units is no more than the
counterpart to the ceaseless displacements and replace-
ments which result from the vital actions of our own
organism, and which are for it, not death but life :
an indispensable part of the process of vital evolution.
That which is unsuitable or injurious must be elimin-
ated. The survival of the fittest can only be accom-
plished by the eradication of the inferior, the defective,
or retrogressive. This useful process is death's work.
Of this progressive elimination and evolution, whereby
the greatest things are shown as the product of the
least, man is the latest result ; the highest modification
of pre-existent forms as yet developed ; the summit of
the organic scale. He has risen to this lofty station
through all the intermediate grades, from the very
lowest. The higher he traces his pedigree, the lower
must he be content to descend in recognising his
original ancestry.

But even if Caliban could have accom.plished his
very natural desire, and ' peopled the isle with Calibans,'
his individual happiness, the experiences which were
to constitute his own life, would assume preeminent
importance to him. Man may possibly learn to feel
some pride at the idea of having risen, by processes of
sexual selection, development, and evolution, to the
summit of all organic life, instead of having been
originally created its supreme lord. He may even
accept ungrudgingly the idea of that higher destiny of
a distant future which will prove him to be no more
than the transitional link in a process destined to beget

I20

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN,

a being to which he shall be no more than the Caliban
of our human ideal. Yet still, when we shall have
learned to recognise that death and life, working to-
gether, carry onwards the race to ail highest conceivable
perfectibilities, our personal interests are all concentrated
in our own entity. That unit is all in all to us, however
insignificant it may be to nature. Death may play its
useful part, no less than life, in working out the grandest
ideal of an unending chain of being, over which the
Divine Mind is recognised brooding in calm supremacy,
and watching the evolution of the creative plan. But
the little link v/hich constitutes our own life is worth to
us all the rest ; and philosophy cannot rob death of its
terrors, whatever religion may do.

' The sense of death is most in apprehension ;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon.
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.'

One summer serves alike for the butterfly and the blade
of grass. The oak lives a thousand summers in its
term. Three score and ten years is the allotted life of
man. But sooner or later death comes to all. The
organic being perishes. It is resolved into its elements.
It has ceased to be. But man, alone of all living
creatures, anticipates, hopes, or fears death. All others
escape that worse death which lies in its apprehension.
Few things are more calculated to illustrate the contrast
between the seemingly unprogressive, unaccumulating
instincts of the lower animals, and that experience which
is the product of human reason, than the sight of the
herd or the sheep-flock driven to the shambles : vic-
tims of that cruel necessity of our nature which, more
than anything else, allies man to the brute. They go
unconsciously as to the pasture field ; and yet for six
thousand years, — or, according to some reckonings, pos-

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

121

sibly for sixty thousand years, — the ox has been driven
to the shambles, and the lamb led to the slaughtering,
with no more warning to the Furvivors than reaches
ourselves from ' the undiscovered country from whose
bourn no traveller returns.* When the Duke, in ' Measure
for Measure,' plays the monitor to Claudio, disguised
as a friar, he urges this plea for the vanity of life : —

' The best of rest is sleep.
And that thou oft provokest ; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not ;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast forget'st. Thou art not certain ;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects.
After the moon. If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows.
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey.
And death unloads thee.'

But the puzzling thing is, that man, in every stage of
his evolution, dreads death ' that makes these odds all
even ;' and yet defies it with a faith in something that
lies beyond. The author of ' The Origin of Civilisation'
puts, indeed, the savage's view of it in this light : ' Far
from having realised to themselves the idea of a future
life, they have not even learnt that death is the natural
end of this. We find a very general conviction among
savages that there is no such thing as natural death.'
To die by a wound is an obvious and explicable ending
of life ; though even in this case death is by means
universally acquiesced in as a natural result, still less
as an ending in the sense of absolute annihilrtion. But
to die what we customarily term a natural death, seems
to the savage mind contrary alike to reason and to
nature. A violent death is comprehensible. It is as
though the crank of your steam-engine were smashed,

122

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

or a hole rent in its boiler by some Armstrong or
Whitworth bolt : and so the machinery must needs stop,
and the life die out of it. But that, with crank whole,
furnace bright, and boiler sound, the engine should
suddenly stop, and defy all efforts to set it going again,
is something akin to the idea which the savage realises
of death in its most ordinary forms. To die by such
obvious causes as £', cleft skull, or a vital spear-thrust,
is to die a natural death. To die by disease is, accord-
ing to savage reasoning, to die by magic, a victim to the
sorceries of some malignant foe.

So far this is death, according to the savage idea of
it. The light has been quenched which no alchemy of
his can relume. And it is so easy to put out the light !
Caliban himself, in the mere wantonness of irresponsible
power, sees

' Yonder two flies, with purple films and pink,
Bask on the pompion-bell above : kills both,'

But, however effected, *if 'twere done when 'tis done,'
it would less matter. But the savage has no belief in
annihilation. He buries his dead out of sight ; burns
the body to asher. ; turns it adrift on the ocean ; scaffolds
it on bier, or in canoe, till the bleached bones alone are
left ; even feasts on it, or in other strangest ways
disposes of the body. But the essential individuality
that animated that body has not perished. He real-
ises, in whatever crude fashion, the unseen presence of
something which has survived the body, yet retains
all its old personality. He anticipates or dreads its
activity, as of one still existing, though no longer cog-
nisant to bodily sense under the changed conditions
of its new life. Even Shakespeare, with all his marvel-
lous objective and creative power, wrought his super-
natural beings on models familiar to him in nature.

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

123

When Sir Humphrey Davy took to peopling the planets
with ideal life, the creations of his fancy proved to be
mere monstrosities of the naturalist. No wonder then
that the idea which the savage realises of the world of
spirits is crude and base. The details are of his own
fashioning ; but not so the belief in a life beyond the
grave. This appears to be an instinct of his moral
nature.

The savage of North Australia will not go near the
graves of the tribe at night or alone. So far the same
might be said of the peasantry of the most civilised
nations of Christendom. But when the Australian
savage must needs pass the graves of the tribe, Keppel
tells us that he carries a fire-stick ' to keep off the spirit
of darkness.' It should rather, probably, be said, to
keep off the spirits : for darkness is everywhere, and
at all times, a bugbear to the child, as to the savage ;
though the grave-yard gives to it an added horror.

This belief in the supernatural seems very natural to
man. It requires no effort in the savage mind to dis-
sociate the ideal ego from * this muddy vesture of decay,'
and to recognise the essential individuality as a thing
apart. The materialistic creed belongs to a very dif-
ferent speculative stage of evolution. Belief in the
supernatural, in any sense, seems to be the supreme
difficulty in our own day, as it has been that of other
eras of speculative research. But doubt is not neces-
sarily 'devil-born.' There lives much faith in honest
doubt : far more, indeed, than in mere unreasoning
credulity. ' Let knowledge grow from more to more ' :
true faith has nothing to fear from that. There is no
more suggestive passage in all the ingenious thought
and accumulated research embodied in Mr. Darwin's
' Descent of Man,' than that in which he reflects on such

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CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN,

perplexing problems as are involved in the relapsing
of dominant historic races; or, again, in such awakenings
as that of Europe from the Dark Ages. ' At this early
period almost all the men of a gentle nature, those given
to meditation or culture of the mind, had no refuge
except in the bosom of the Church, which demanded
celibacy ; and this could hardly fail to have had a de-
teriorating influence on each successive generation.
During this same period the Holy Inquisition selected
with extreme care the freest and boldest men in order
to burn or imprison them. In Spain alone some of the
best men, those who doubted and questioned — and
without doubting there can be no progress, — were
eliminated during three centuries at the rate of a
thousand a year. The evil which the Church thus
effected, though no doubt counterbalanced to a cer-
tain, perhaps large extent in other ways, is incal-
culable.'

Mr. Darwin has expressed very clearly the impression
forced on his mind as the result of close intercourse
with typical representatives of widely-different savage
races, of many traits of character showing how similar
their minds are to our own. He traces a community of
arts, implements, &c., not to traditions derived from any
common progenitor, but to similarity in mental faculties.
The same observation is applicable to various simple
beliefs and customs, to modes of burial and choice of
places of sepulture ; and as naturalists, when they ob-
serve a close agreement in habits, tastes, and dispositions,
between two or more domestic races, trace them to a
common progenitor similarly endowed, so, says Mr.
Darwin, ' the same argument may be applied with much
force to the races of man.' The way in which he does
apply it, is, of course, in harmony with his own hypo-

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

thesis of evolution and descent, and need not now tempt
us to discussion. It is the unity of mind, hnking the rude
savage and the Christian philosopher in a faith in the
supernatural, and the conviction of a life beyond the
grave, to which reference is now made. It requires no
effort on the part of the savage to believe this. Faith
with him is not an act of the mind. It is a state of the
mind, from which he cannot emancipate himself if he
would. And so, wherever civilised Europeans have
found their way for the first time to new continents
or isolated island-worlds, the idea has manifested itself
that they were visitors from the world of spirits ; if
not the native dead returned anew from beyond the
grave.

The belief that there is ' no resurrection, neither angel
nor spirit,' is the work of the Sadducees of civilisation
in its decline. It reappears from time to time, not
merely as the evolution of scepticism, but is the
natural concomitant and counterpart of feverish cre-
dulity, the hot and cold fits of the same unhealthy
moral condition. Man, in the unsophisticated stages of
savage life — whether that be one of degradation, or only
the lowest round of the ascending ladder of human
evolution, — seems to find a doctrine of annihilation
among the hardest things to believe. The American
Indian, like the prehistoric races of Britain's cairns and
barrows, provides food and weapons for his dead, where-
with to begin the new life on which they are enter-
ing. He hears their spirits in the winds as they moan
among the trees, and listens for their voices in all the
sounds of nature. According to his obscure conceptions
of the disembodied spirit, it long haunts its old life-
scenes, lingering around them, reluctant to depart. In
its very crudest form, this belief in a life distinct from

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CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

bodily existence, is something utterly inconceivable in
relation to the brute mind.

But there is another idea, very familiar to the human
mind in widely diverse stages of civilisation, and that is
a realisation, in some sort, of the emancipated spirit, as,
by its deliverance from the bonds of the flesh, released
from all absolute restrictions in relation to space, and
consequently present to the object of its affections,
however remote the scene of death and the place of the
body's rest may be. This idea is curiously indicated
in one of the scenes of ' The Tempest.' Ferdinand, in
astonishment at hearing his own Italian tongue uttered
by the fair vision of the island maiden, exclaims to
Miranda —

* My language ! heavens ! —
I am the best of them that speak this speech,
Were I but where 'tis spoken.'

Whereupon Prospero interposes, with this challenge —

' How ! the best ?
What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?'

And Ferdinand, whose belief in the death, not only of
his father, but of the whole passengers and crew, is
absolute, replies — . .

» 'A single thing, as I am now, that wonders

To hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me ;
And that he does I weep : myself am Naples ;
Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld
The king my father wreck'd.'

The fact that his father is drowned involves, as it were
of necessity, that his spirit must be present and hear
these utterances ; unless we interpret him in matter-
of-fact literalness, as meaning no more than that he,
being now king, hears himself speak. It is an idea
dwelt on, in its purest and most elevated form, in the
* In Memoriam ' of Tennyson ; as where he asks —

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

127

* Do we indeed desire the dead

i Should still be near us, at our tide?

Is there no baseness we would hide ? »

',. No inner vileness that we dread?

Shall he for whose applause I strove, .

I had such reverence for his blame, .

See with clear eyes some hidden shame,

And I be lessen'd in his love?

I wrong the grave with fears untrue: •

Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
There must be wisdom with great Death;

The dead shall look me through and through.

Be near us when we climb or fall:
? Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours

With larger, other eyes than ours, , ,

To make allowance for us all.'

So the poet shapes into noblest forms fancies which are
no less present to the most prosaic minds ; and then,
glancing at the seeming strife between God and Nature
in the modern expositions of science, he pauses over
Nature's fancied response : —

'I bring to life, I bring to death,

The spirit does but mean the breath; ' *t

I know no morel'

But it is only to turn anew to the sure hope, and wait
for answer and redress 'behind the veil.' In this way
the loftiest ideas of the imaginative poet only expand
the undefined conceptions of a spiritual life, the in-
stinctive yearnings after immortality, of the rudest
savage mind. To the evolutionist, ho.wever, this is no
innate, much less a divinely-prompted instinct, peculiar
to man, as a being made in the Divine image and
endowed with a living soul : but only one of the latest
phases in that continuous progression from the very
lowest stages of mere vitality, which seems to him so
easy of demonstration. To him the long vista shines

lit

CAIWAX, THE rilEOLOGlAN.

with light, and the development of each successive step,
from the first dawn of embryo life — if not, indeed, from
inorganic matter, — is clear ; and it may be well here to
glance at the process, as it reveals itself to him. ' There
is no evidence,' says Mr. Darwin, 'that man was aborigi-
nally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence
of an omnipotent God. On the contrary, there is ample
evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from
men who have long resided with savages, that numerous
races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of
one or more gods, and who have no words in their
languages to express such an idea. The question is,
of course, wholly distinct from that higher one, whether
there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe ; and
this has been answered in the affirmative by the hig' "st
intellects that have ever lived. If, however, we in ^
under the name " religion " the belief in unseen or
spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different ; for this
belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised
races.' But, on the hypothesis of evolution, there is no
difficulty in comprehending how this arose. The facul-
ties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity, along with
the first germ of reason, are all successive results of
development ; and the rational stage at length reached,
by whatever process, it is not unreasonable to assume
that the being — now become man, — would naturally
crave to understand what was passing around him, and
speculate on his own existence. He would, in fact,
prove himself to be man by looking before and after ;
by asking Whence .■' and Whither ?

That dreams may have first suggested the idea of
spirits to the savage mind, is the theory most favoured
as accounting for this indisputable universality of a
faith in the supernatural ; and to this Mr. Herbert

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

i?9

Spencer inclines to trace the earliest conception by
, man of his own dual nature, as a being at once cor-
poreal and spiritual. Hut if man be in reality such a
double essence, it would be strange that he should be
utterly unconscious of that spiritual part of himself
,by which such consciousness is tested and appreciated.
As to the visions of the night, they have their own
unsolved mysteries ; and very different theories as to
their origin will depend on our faith in an actual human
soul, or in a mere vital brain-force as an evolution of the
living organism, and our intellect as the brute instinct
developed into the self-conscious stage. The shapings
of man's waking beliefs seem, on the latter theory, to
be little less the mere denning of shadowy fancies, than
the subjective impressions of his sleep. We may surely
ask for an indisputable theory, comprehensive enough for
the whole phenomena of dreams, before accepting what
is assumed to be no more than a misinterpretation of
cerebral impressions and sensations, as the source of
man's faith in the spiritual world, and so of his religion
and belief in a God. Some at least of the mental
phenomena which dreams reveal by no means militate
against the long-cherished faith in the soul as the
body's guest : not a mere impersonation of brain-
work, but the living worker alike through hand and
brain, and which shall continue its being, and attain
to a higher life, when hand and brain have alike re-
turned to the elements, or become transformed into
other organisms.

In this, as in other relations, time has done Its work
on the Caliban of the poet's creation, as on other
entities. The Caliban of that first stage of evolution
which offers itself for our study in ' The Tempest,' had,
indeed, his dreams begot of the island harmonies, that

'3°

CALTBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

gave delight and harmed not ; soothed to sweetest sleep,
and opened up to him such wealth of wonderland that
when he waked he cried to dream again. These, how-
ever, belong to the enchantments wrought by Ariel's
pipe and tabor, and took their shape accordingly :
though the natural and supernatural intermingle so
harmoniously in Shakespeare's art, that nothing seems
to us strange there, any more than in our own dreams.
They play thdir part accordingly, as the most naturally-
begotten dreams might do, in helping us to realise the
transitional characteristics of the strange being wrought
by the poet's fancy in that pregnant age.

According to the promptings of his own limited
desires, the Caliban of Shakespeare had no higher
thought than to follow, dog-like, a better master than
Prospero ; or, as most covetable of all conceivable real-
isations, to roam at large, himself sole lord of nature
in his little island-world. But even if, as some have
fancied, ' The Tempest ' is the latest of all Shake-
speare's works, the last ' heir of his invention ' ; some two
and a half centuries have since transpired, and evolution
has done its work on the strange islander of the poet's
fancy. The Caliban of Browning is a very different
being from Trinculo's 'very shallow monster.' As he
lies there kicking his feet in the cool slush, as muc.i at
his ease as metaphysics will let him, and looks out
across the sea, puzzling his brains about many things
very incomprehensible to brains in such a merely tran-
sitional stage of development, he comes upon the in-
explicable problem of life and death ; for, unless, some
strange day, Setebos, or that mysterious greater than
Setebos, should change, he sees no chance of bettering.
' Conceiveth all things will continue thus,' and having
latterly, in his experiences with Prospero, found life hard

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

131

enough, and the supernal powers only omnipotent,— by
no means beneficent, — he

• Believeth with the life the pain shall stop.
His dam held different, that after death
He both plagued enemies and feasted friends :
Idly I He doeth His worst in this our life,
Giving just respite lest we die through pain.
Saving last pain for worst, — with which, an end.
Meanwhile the best way to escape His ire
Is not to seem too happy.'

All which, as reasoning, may be apt enough for the
later savage stage of evolution, with its apprehension of
a last pain and worst, and its traditions of an untenable
Sycorax-creed of future rewards and plagues ; but it
by no means pertains to the true missing-link : man's
assumed progenitor, in that transitional stage of evo-
lution which Shakespeare so nearly realises for us. It
is a stage of being which must be supposed, on any
theoiy, to have endured for the briefest possible period,
for it seems to place the half transmuted being in a
condition of most unstable equilibrium, — too much of
the brute for reasoning to do its part eftectually ; too
much of the being dependent on reason for the requisite
brute means of offence and defence, in that struggle for
the survival of the fittest, on the results of which the
calling of perfected humanity into existence was to
depend.

The great difficulty, as the originator of the whole
theory and system of evolution admits, which presents
itself to the recipients of it as a satisfactory answer to
questionings concerning the origin of man, ' is the high ■
standard of intellectual power and of moral disposition
which he has attained. But every one who admits the
general principle of evolution, must see that the mental
powers of the higher animals, which are the same in

132

CUBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

kind with those of mankind, though so different in
degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval
between the mental powers of one of the higher apes
and of a fish, or between those of an ant and a scale-
insect, is immense.' It is here taken for granted as
certain to be admitted by all who accept the general
principle of evolution, that the difference between the
intellectual characteristics of man and the ape is only
one of degree, though few assumptions would seem to
stand more in need of proof. But this being supposed
to be granted, it is further noticeable that the mental
faculties are variable in domesticated animals, and that
the variations are inherited. The same transmission of
inherited and progressive faculties through natural
selection, is further assumed as conceivable in an ever-
progressive scale ; and assuming, as before stated, that
the difference between the intellectual powers of the do-
mesticated animal and man is only one of degree,
when at length they reached that stage which would
constitute the endowments of what we ordinarily under-
stand as a rational being, then the intellect must have
been all-important to the animal, now become man,
' enabling him to use language, to invent and make
weapons, tools, traps, &c. ; by which means, in combi-
nation with his social habits, he long ago became the
most dominant of all living creatures.' As to the moral
sense, that element which deals with motives, appeals to
a standard of right and wrong, conceives the idea of re-
tributive justice, responsibility, the immortality of the
soul, and all the relations which link the human to the
divine : that follows ' firstly, from the enduring and
always present nature of the social instincts, in which
respect man agrees with the lower animals ; and
secondly, from his mental faculties being highly active,

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

•33

and his impressions of past events extremely vivid, in
which respects he differs from the lower animals.'

The assumed instinctive belief in God has been
affirmed to be universal in man, and so has been
adduced as an unmistakable and absolute distinction
between him and the lower animals. The capacity for
such belief might be advanced with more force ; for it
cannot be denied that the belief in the divine father-
hood, which constitutes an essential element in the
conception of God, apart from the beneficent teachings
of Christianity, rarely has a place in the savage's theology.
But a belief in the supernatural appears to be admittedly
universal, however accounted for or explained away. In
reality, however, if we must look for a special, innate and
instinctive faculty in man, which may be advanced
before all such distinctive attributes as tool-using, fire-
making, cooking, reason, speech, and all else, I should
select his belief in his own immortality : the ineradicable
conviction of the existence of some essential element of
being, which survives dea.h and defies annihilation. It is
an idea vaguely, crudely, childishly set forth in the
beliefs of the rude Australian, Pacific islander, or Pata-
gonian savago. But, account for it how we may, the
rudest and most uncultured mind conceives of man
as something more than a mere animated organisation ;
realises the conception of the soul as distinct from, even
while dwelling in that body, and capable of continued
existence apart from it. It is indeed affirmed, in reply,
that the barbarous races of man ' possess no clear belief
in the immortality of the soul.' But slight reflection
on the nature of the doctrine should suffice to indicate
the natural distinction between any clear definition of
such a faith, and the instinctive, . ineradicable con-
viction, in which is involved the belief that death does

\f7

134

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

not annihilate the individual ; that wholly apart from
that dead body the individuality of the deceased is still
perpetuated and continues a conscious existence.

As to clearly-defined beliefs on immortality, the nature
and personality of God, or kindred subjects, outside of
formulised creeds and rituals, how rare are they. The
definition extorted from the uneducated man, as from
the child, rarely mirrors, even in a remote degree, the
belief it professes to embody. The mere attempt at
definition dissipates the ideal, as the making of a graven
image clouds the perception of an unseen God. Obtain,
if you can, from ordinary intelligent civilised men, apart
from the formulae of creeds and catechisms, answers to
such questions as, ' What is heaven, or the place of de-
parted spirits } Has it any relation to space .'' Is it a
locality ? What is the soul .-' ' In some way or other they
have been thinking of such matters all their lives, and
yet the probability is that some will be shocked, and all
will be puzzled by the demand. Or give them for text
St. Paul's Corinthian questionings and definings : ' Hov/
are the dead raised up, and with what body do they
come.^' — with the exquisite analogies of the seed which
can only quicken if it die. ' So also is the resurrection
of the dead. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in
incorruption ; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in
glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power ; it
is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body :' —
words which have sounded to so many in all their myste-
rious beauty and power, as with tearful eyes they have
looked their last on the loved ones of earth, and heard
those other words, ' earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust
to dust.'

As we return from thoughts so elevated and so
solemn, to survey once more the kingdom of living

CALIBAN, THE ^/lEOLOGIAxV.

IS?

nature, and question it anew in relation to the novel but
singularly suggestive problems which science is ad-
vancing, all that is required of us is to admit what is
thus assumed to be indisputable. We must see, as every
one who admits the general principle of evolution does,
'that the mental powers of the higher animals are the
same in kind with those of mankind, though so different
in degree.' We start in the course of reasoning which
leads to the acceptance of the general principle referred
to, with such an infinitesimal minimum of capacity as
pertains to the Ascidian moluscoid, a mere sack adhering
to the rocks of primeval seas. From this we trace, or
assume, the gradual evolution of sensation, instinct, and
all else, up to the mental powers of the highest irrational
animal ; and then — while still acknowledging that the
difference between the mind of the very lowest savage
and that of the highest animal is enormous, — we are
required to grant that this is a mere dififeren je of degree.
But why must this be granted ? It assuredly does not
seem a self-evident proposition. When I compare the
most wonderful evidence of canine intelligence with the
every-day operations of the savage or the child, they
seem to have such an essential difference between them,
that I cannot conceive of the one changing into the other.
They differ in kind : or if not, the proof is still wanting
which shows them to be the same ; and surely the
enormous difference acknowledged on all hands is not to
be dismissed, as though it were one mere missing link in
an otherwise continuous chain. At best there seems in
the highest animals but a scanty minimum of intellectual
power, and no adequate initiative for anything bearing
even a shadowy resemblance to the moral elements of
humanity, out of which to evolve the being only ' a
little lower than the angels.'

136

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

The transitional being vaguely dreamed of in the
visions of elder travellers, — human after some imperfect
fashion, yet not of the seed of Adam, — seems to task
the genius of Shakespeare for its realisation ; and when
clearly presented to us with his wondrous objective
power, it is still but the highest evolution of the brute,
and yet not without elements surpassing those of man's
hypothetical brute -progenitor. To the modern evo-
lutionist, however, no clear boundary-line is supposed
to have separated the evolutionary anthropoid from
the perfectly-developed man. 'Whether,' says Darwin,
' primeval man, when he possessed very few arts of the
rudest kind, and when his power of language was
extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called
man, must depend on the definition we employ. In a
series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like
creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible
to fix on any definite points where the term " man "
ought to be used. But this is a matter of very little
importance.' Of very little importance! And yet it
takes for granted the grand step resulting, not in a mere
gradation of form, but in a change so enormous as the
transition from the irrational brute to rational man ; or,
at the least, it assumes it to be an insensible graduation,
easy, natural, inevitable : a mere bursting into flower
of the ripened bud.

Our modern poet, Robert Browning, undesignedly
perhaps, but as becomes the true poet, mirroring the
thought of his own age, — an age begot of the French
and other revolutions ; by no means of the German
reformation, — has carried his Caliban far beyond the
irrational stage of being, into that of an advanced
reasoning savage : if not, indeed, in some respects be-
yond the highest point of definite reasoning in savage

CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN.

minds. Shakespeare, on the contrary, presents the ideal
of highest brutish evolution, artificially or supernaturally
endowed with the means of giving expression to its
thoughts ; yet neither a man, nor any link in the possible
pedigree of manhood : a fellow-being of the jay and the
marmoset, of the spotted oncelot, the blind mole, and
the crane. It is a true creation of genius ; wonderfully
distinctive, consistent, and well-defined.

In so far as the creative genius of the greatest of poets
has thus conceived for us the ideal of the anthropo-
morphoid, as far above the very highest known simiadae,
as that falls short of man — 'endued with intellectual
sense and soul,' — he has supplied a link more consistent
with any conceivable evolution of which the anthropo-
morpha are susceptible, than any ideal based on assumed
stages of lowest degradation of savage man. But the
lines of evolution of the anthropoid and the savage,
according to such ideal, are parallels. They may admit
of endless development, but they will not coalesce.

Dryden grossly travestied the wonderful ideal, when
he dared, with profane hands, to drag down the beauti-
ful comedy of Shakespeare's mature genius to the
impure standard of the Restoration stage ; yet even he
was struck with wonder at the profound truthfulness of
a creature of which nature furnished no type. Schlegel
pronounces the conception to be one of inconceivable
consistency and depth. Hazlitt, speaking of it as one of
the wildest and most abstracted of all Shakespeare's
impersonations, says : * The character grows out of the
soil where it is rooted, uncontrolled, uncouth and wild,
uncramped by any of the meannesses of custom. It is
of fhe earth, earthy. It seems almost to have been dug
out of the ground, with a soul instinctively added to it,
answering to its wants and origin.' Gervinus, in a too

1^8

CALIBAN THE THEOLOGIAN.

realistic interpretation of the offspring of the blear-eyed
hag Sycorax, and still more of the wrathful hyperboles
of Prospero, misses the full appreciation of this super-
natural being, belonging to a wholly different order and
genus from all the other varied conceptions of Shake-
spearean genius. Yet he, too, has aptly characterised
Caliban as an embryonic being, defiled, as it were, by
his earthly origin from the womb of savage nature.

The extreme contrast between the seventeenth and
the nineteenth century's conception of the reasoning
brute, with a brute-soul answering to its origin and
desires, is most noticeable. Shakespeare's Caliban
reasons throughout from the sheer animal point of view ;
and his dam's god is a mere embodiment of power ; no
object of faith or worship ; nor indeed a being with
whom he claims to have any personal relations. There
is no indication of belief in such unseen or spiritual
agencies as is admittedly all but universal with the most
degraded savages. We must, of course, except here the
dramatic machinery, with Ariel and the spirits who
bestow upon the eyes of the young lovers some vanity
of Prospero's art ; and of whom he says presently —

' Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.'

There is in the Caliban of Shakespeare no intellectual
recognition of the supernatural, such as in Browning's
Island Theologian makes him so essentially human. It
is a distinction coinciding with what we re-affirm in
relation to the present line of argument : that man in
the very lowest stage of savage degradation does in
oO far recognise his immortal nature in the realisation,
however vaguely, of some idea of the human soul as
that which is the essence of the individual, and which

CALIBAN THE THEOLOGIAN.

139

survives the death of the body. To him the spirit
means something wholly distinct from the breath ; and
death is very definitely the separation of soul and body.
This perception has all the appearance of an innate,
instinctive self-consciousness. It involves the belief in
a future life, and includes the germ of a faith in im-
mortality. It is the original endowment on which the
ennobling belief in an omnipotent, omniscient God, and
the vitalising faith in a divine Redeemer, are to be in-
grafted in the fulness of time. It is ' the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen ;' man's
heritage as man ; and wanting which he would fitly
rank with the beasts that perish.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SUPERNATURAL.

* A thousand fantasies
Begin to tlirong into my memory
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names.' — Comus.

THE belief in the supernatural, however it maybe
explained, or even be sought to be explained
away, appears to be universal among mankind. In the
discussions which it has elicited in special reference to
the distinctive elements of humanity, the important
distinction between actual beliefs and their definition
has not always been kept in view. One of the difficulties
assigned by Sir John Lubbock in arriving at any clear
conception of the religious syste.ns of strange races, is
traced by him to ' a confusion between a belief in ghosts
and that in an immortal spirit.' Captain Burton notes
this nice distinction in reference to the negro, that he
believes ' in a ghost, but not in spirit ; in a present
immaterial, but not in a future ; ' and the essential
diversity of the two opinions is accordingly assumed.
' The spirit is not necessarily regarded as immortal
because it does not perish with the body.' This seems
an altogether artificial refinement, based on the dog-
matic creeds and beliefs of comparatively modern
centuries ; and in which the real significance of this
admitted belief in a human spirit, or soul, absolutely
distinct from the body, and capable of surviving it, is
slighted if not entirely ignored. If the spirit is believed

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141

to survive after death, then any idea of its subsequent
mortality can only be of a negative kind, the mere
result of the incapacity to grasp with any clearness the
idea of life immortal. In this respect it may aptly
enough compare with our ideas on the limitation or
infinity of space. M, Louis Figuier, who has undertaken,
in his ' Day after Death,' to solve the mysteries of a
future life, defines God as the Infinite in spirit, and the
universe as the Infinite in extent ; and then he locates
this infinite God at the mathematical centre of the
worlds which compose this infinite universe : which
seems very much like undertaking to construct a circle
which shall have no circumference, and yet finding for it
a centre ! The old doctrine of Anaximander of Miletus,
whereby he accounted for the suspension of the earth in
the centre of the universe, was that, being equidistant
from the containing heaven in every direction, there was
no reason why it should move in one direction rather
than another. Anaxagoras modified this doctrine, and
was accused of atheism, because of the physical ex-
planations he assigned to celestial phenomena. The
speculations of philosophy during all the later centuries
have not achieved a solution of the problem of limited
or unlimited space. Our ideas on such subjects are apt
to vanish in the effort at definition, like cloud-castles
when we attempt to draw them.

Religion ; iJ creed are by no means synonymous
terms. The medieval controversies on the special nature
and procession of the Holy Spirit, and the hopeless
schism of the Eastern and Western Church re[)resented
by the single word Filioqui\ illustrate theological defini-
tions forcing into concrete form such details of belief as
no ordinary layman could define, or would probably
recognise any necessity for defining, till challenged by the

THE SUPERNATURAL.

exactions of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The modern
scientific inquirer is apt at times to be little less dog-
matic in his demands for concrete forms of thought than
the old theologian. Our elaborated and long-defined
ideas of the human soul, a future state, life, immortality,
and God, are not only placed alongside the crude, wholly
undefined, instinctive beliefs of the savage as to the
survival of the spirit or soul of man after death : but a
logical consistency of detail is demanded in reference to
opinions which have been accepted like any other intui-
tive belief. So long as the savage recognises an immaterial
spirit distinct from the body, surviving its dissolution,
and perpetuating the personality and individuality iden-
tified with it, the precise conception he forms as to the
duration of this immaterial life is of secondary signi-
ficance. Experience has nothing to teach him in
reference to it. While the memory of the dead is fresh,
the idea of the surviving spirit will be strongly impressed
on the mind. But as the recollection of the deceased
fades away, the conception of his immaterial life will grow
correspondingly dim, until le two disappear together.

The clearly-defined belief in the life and immortality
of the Christian creed is due to the teachings of Christ
Himself, and to the doctrine educed and taught by its
first preachers, as the great lesson of the resurrection.
Sir John Lubbock, after affirming that ' the belief in an
universal, independent, and endless existence is confined
to the highest races,' quotes, in confirmation of the
absence of any belief in a future state, a reported en-
deavour to enforce the acceptance of this doctrine on a
savage. The instructor ' tried long and patiently to
make a very intelligent docile Australian Black under-
stand his existence without a body, but the Black never
could keep his countenance, and generally made an

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143

excuse to get away. One day the teacher watched, and
found tliat he went to have a hearty fit of laughter at
the absurdity of the idea of a man living and going
about without arms, legs, or mouth to eat. For a long
time he could not believe that the gentleman was serious,
and when he did realise it, the more serious the teacher
was the more ludicrous the whole affair appeared to the
Black.' This narrative may perhaps fairly exhibit the
actual condition of a savage mind to which the idea of
life apart from bodily existence was absurd. But had
the Australian been as subtle as Browning's Caliban,
he might have appealed to good authority on ' the
physical theory of another life,' and denied that the
active existence of the soul is conceivable apart from
some definite relation to space ; or he might have de-
manded an explanation of St. Paul's statement concern-
ing ' the spiritual body' of the resurrection. Possibly
enough, however, the teacher presented ideas which, in
the sense in which they were interpreted by the poor
Australian, were wholly ludicrous ; while, all the time,
he held to the belief of his people in an immaterial life
after death. The Swedenborgian ideal of a future state
is to some minds so gross as to excite ridicule. But
their mirth, however unseemly, would be very falsely
construed into laughter at the supposed absurdity of all
belief in a life beyond the grave. There is only too apt
a tendency to treat any incomprehensible faith as folly.
The doctrine of transubstantiation, or the real presence,
appears to thousands not only untenable, but absurd ;
to thousands more its denial is blasphemy and sheer
atheism. The scientific sceptic who laughs at spirit-
rapping and other kindred follies, exposes himself to
denunciation as an infidel materialist. In truth the
actual beliefs of the majority of men scarcely admit of

•(

144

THE SUPERNATURAL.

! i

r ■;

logical analysis ; and the ' foolishness' of the belief in a
future life is neither confined to savages, nor to modern
discovery.

In his poem of ' Cleon,' Browning has embodied, in
the form of a letter from the Greek ^oet to his friend
Protos, the longings of a pagan Greek of the first century
for some revelation of that very immortality which, when
presented as the doctrine of the resurrection, he rejects
as folly. Reminded that he shall live as a poet, m the
immortality of his verse, Cleon repels such consola-
tion as a vain deception of mere words. As his soul
becomes intensified in power and insight, the increasing
weight of years warns him of life's close : —

'When all my works wherein I prove my worth,
Being present still to mock me in men's mouths,
Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou,
I— 1, the feeling, thinking, acting man.
The man who loved his life so over much,
Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I c^are at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us.
That, stung by straightness of our life made straight,
On purpose to make sweet the life at large —
Freed l)y the throbbing impulse we call death,
We burst there as the worm into the fly.
Who while a worm still, wants his wings. But, no I
Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and alas !
He must have done so, were it possible 1 '

But Cleon, having thus given utterance to the earnest
longings of a vain desire, adds a postscript on some
trivial matters. The messenger of his correspondent, as
it seems, is the bearer of a letter from him to one called
Paulus, a barbarian Jew, who has much to say about one
' Christus ' and this very immortality of which the poet

THE SUPERNATURAL.

•45

fain would learn. But with true Greek contempt for all
beyond the Hellenic pale, he writes —

' Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circnmcised,
Hath access to a secret s^hut from us?

Certain slaves

Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;

And (as I gathered fiom a bystander)

Their doctrines could be held by no sane man.'

The search for defined or consistent creeds on such
matters of inquiry and belief, among nations in widely
differing stages of progress, is apt to prove illusory, and
among savage races is vain and deceptive. Wc trans-
mute their ideas in the alembic of our own creeds and
opinions, and obtain results unconsciously adulterated
by prejudice and misconception. We are trying in
prosaic literalness to do what the poet Browning has
done with the Caliban of Shakespeare : to enter as it
were into his brain, and think his own thoughts, wholly
unaffected by those of the actual thinker. It seems to me
sufficient for all that is attempted to be deduced from
such beliefs, that the rudest savage does realise the idea
of man's spirit as something at least ethereal, capable of
leaving the body, of existing apart from it, of haunting
the deserted dwelling, or hovering round the grave.
With a very vague conception of what is implied in the
idea of immateriality, his belief in the invisible ghost or
spirit does 'realise the essential ideas of an immaterial
existence, a spiritual life with the personality perpetuated
apart from the body, and surviving death. Whether
that survival shall be regarded as temporary or eternal
is much more a matter of definition of the instinctive
belief, than essential to its universality or significance
as one of the most characteristic attributes of human
reason.

146

T//£ SUPERNATURAL.

So soon as we reach the stage of minutely defined
beHefs and formulated creeds, they prove to be full of
inconsistencies ; and before the printing-press superseded
tradition, and came provided with ready-made opinions
for all, the interblendings of ecclesiastical dogma and
popular folk-lore resulted in conceptions singularly
quaint and even grotesque. The instinctive belief is
one thing : the defined ideas, whether formulated into
vulgar beliefs, or into written creeds, are of a wholly
different nature. The medieval doctrine of purgatory,
so curiously intenvoven into Shakespeare's ' Hamlet,' is
an illustration of the intermingling of those diverse
elements ; and hence the strange extravagances which it
involves. It had been adopted into the teachings of the
early Church, had modified the whole prevailing ideas of
a future life, and when developed by the opinions of
successive generations, had been reduced to a dogmatic
form by the teachings of centuries. This intermediate
state of the soul accordingly affected the superstitions of
thousands, long after it had ceased to be a part of their
accepted creed.

It is curious, for example, to turn to the current
popular ballads of Presbyterian Scotland, and to note
how ineradicable have been the impressions produced on
the popular mind by the ancient faith, in spite of the
vigorous crusade of ecclesiastical discipline and public
opinion conjoined, for upwards of three centuries. Pasch,
Yule, Halloween, Fasternseen, Rudeday, Whitsunday,
Candlemas, and other rustic anniversaries, all survive as
relics of the ancient faith; and are mostly commemorated
still by an unpremeditated yet universal consent, accord-
ing to the Old Style. 3uch a faithful popular tradition
thus running counter alike to modern almanacs and creeds,
has not unreasonably been advanced as confirmation of

THE SUPERNATURAL.

the authenticity of the ballad-poems in which the same
ideas have been transmitted, mainly by oral tradition.
But there also the supernatural beliefs of earlier gene-
rations have proved no less tenacious than such eccle-
siastical traditions. In ' Tamlane ' and ' True Thomas '
the apparition of the Queen of Elfland gives the special
character to these old ballads. But the Scottish elves
peopled the scaurs and dens of a wild country which for
centuries had been the scene of bloody feud and violence,
and reflect in their sombre hue the characteristics of
their source. They were esteemed a capricious, irritable,
and vindictive race, very different from the airy haunters
of England's moonlit glades. The Scottish Elfin Queen
is in part the embodiment of the same gloomy super-
stitions which begot the witch-hags and other coarse
imaginings of the national demonology. Nevertheless
the Queen of Elfland and her mischievous elves are
generally designated the Good People : the canny pru-
dence of the Scot leading him to apply fair words in the
very naming of such testy and capricious sprites. Even
in the indictments of ecclesiastical courts this is adhered
to, as .11 that of Alison Pearson, convicted at St. An-
drews, in 1586, c '' witchcraft, and consulting with evil
spirits. She is charged with 'haunting and repairing
with he gude neighbours and Queene of Elfland, thir
divers ears by-past, as she had confest ;' and, among
other tl !igs, she had been warned by one she met in
Fairyland to 'sign herself that she be not taken
away, for the teind of them are tane to hell everie
year.'

The Scottish Elfin Queen is, accordingly, a very dif-
ferent character from the sportive Mab of Shakespeare's
Mercutio, who gallops night by night over lawyers'
fingers, courtiers' knees, and through lovers' brains ; and

I. 2

148

THE SUPERNATURAL.

only becomes ' the angry Mab ' when, as she drives o'er
slumbering ladies' lips she finds ' their breaths with
sweetmeats tainted are.' Still less does she resemble
that ethereal Queen of Shadows, Titania, in the ' Mid-
summer Night's Dream.' Her elfin court has indeed its
deceptive pleasures, its glamour, and its green-wood
revels ; but she and her elves are the vassals of Hell ;
and in the fanciful ballad, as in the prosaic indictment
for witchcraft, are describel as paying their tithe, not
annually indeed, but every seven years to the devil.
Tamlane, for example, tells the Earl's daughter, who
meets this wanderer from Fairyland ' among the leaves
sae green' —

' And never would I tire, Janet,

In Fairyland to dwell; . j

But aye, at every seven years,
They pay the teind to hell;
And I'm sae fat and fair of flesh,
I fear 'twill be mysell.'

The ballad of ' Tamlane ' is mentioned in the ' Com-
playnt of Scotland,' printed at St. Andrews in 1549, and
undoubtedly embodies the superstitions of a much
earlier date.

But it is more significant for our present purpose to
see reflected in the early Scottish ballads the popular
ideas of spirits, ghosts, and apparitions of the dead,
haunting the scenes of their unexpiated crimes, or the
grave where the murdered body had been laid. The
resemblance between these ill-defined incongruous ideas,
and some of those already referred to as characteristic of
the savage conception of death and the departed spirit,
is unmistakeable. But, besides the apparitions of the
dead who can find no repose in the grave till expiation
has been made for some deadly sin, or of the victim of
crime whose unresting spirit wanders abroad, like that

THE SUPER NA TURAL.

149

of the murdered Dane, demanding vengeance, there are
characteristic types of national superstition : as where
the dead are disquieted by the mourning of loving ones
refusing to be comforted because they are not ; or again
where rest is denied them till they recover their plighted
troth. In ' The Wife of Usher's Well,' her three stout
and stalwart sons, sent by her over the sea, are scarcely
a week gone from her when she learns that they are
drowned. In her agony at their loss, she prays that the
winds may never again be still, nor the floods be calmed,
till her sons return to her ' in earthly flesh and blood.'
The dread prayer disturbs the rest of her sons, and the
result is thus set forth in homely simplicity : —

' It fell about the Martinmas,

When nights are lang and mirk,
The carline wife's three sons cam hame.
And their hats were o' the birk.

It neither grew in syke nor ditch,

Nor yet in ony sheugh ;
But at the gates o' Paradise,

That birk grew fair enf'gh.'

And so the three drowned men remain, till the dawn
approaches, with their mother tending on them in her
short-lived joy, as seemingly her living sons restored to
her. She lays them to rest with all a mother's tender
care, wraps her mantle about them, and sitting down
by their bedside, at length yields to sleep, ere the red-
cock's crow warns them to begone. They cannot tarry
longer from Paradise ; but their consideration for her
is indicated with touching simplicity by their urging
one another to linger to the latest moment on her ac-
count : —

' Up then crew the red red cock,

And up and crew the gray ;

The eldest to the youngest said,

"'Tis time we were away;

>50

7W£ SUPERNATURAL.

The cock doth craw, the day doth daw.

The channering worm doth chide;
Gin we be miss'd out o' our place,
, A sair pain we maun bide."

"Lie still, lie still but a little wee while.

Lie still but if we may ;
Gin my mother should miss us when she wakes,

She'll gae mad ere it be day,'"

In the confusion of ideas as shown in the birch
gathered at the gates of Paradise, the penance dreaded
in case of their absence being discovered, and the chiding
of the grave's channering, or fretting worm, there are
striking illustrations of the undefined blending of con-
ceptions of an immaterial existence wholly apart from
the body ; with the difficulty, as common to the mind
of the English peasant as to that of the Australian
savage, of conceiving any clear realisation of the dis-
embodied spirit, or of death distinct from the 'wormy
grave.' The same homely pathos and tenderness inter-
mingle with a like confused interblending of the grave
and the spiritual life, in ' Clerk Saunders,' ' William's
Ghost,' and other Scottish ballads of this class. In
both the dead are represented as reclaiming their faith
and troth, without which they cannot rest in their graves.
In the former ballad, Clerk Saunders, a noble lover who
had been slain in the arms of May Margaret, the King's
daughter, returns after * a twelvemonth and a day,' and
standing at her bower window an hour before the dawn,
addresses her: —

' Give me my faith and troth again.
True love, as I gi'ed them to thee.'

Before she will yield to his request, she insists on her
lover coming within her bower and kissing her, though
he warns her that his mouth is cold and smells of the
grave. She questions him about the other world, and

THE SUPERNATURAL.

I SI

especially of what comes of women ' who die in strong
travailing.' He replies in the same simple style of
homely pathos as in the ballad already quoted : —

•Their beds are made in the heavens high,
Down at the foot of our good Lord's knee,
Weel set about wi' gillyfiDwers;
I wot sweet company for to see.

O cocks are crowing a merry midnight,

I wot the wild-fowl are boding day;
The psalms of heaven will soon be sung,

And I ere now will be missed away.'

May Margaret returns her lover's troth by a curiously
literal process, thereby freeing the disembodied spirit of
a tie which still bound it to earth, and then he leaves
her with the tender assurance that

' Gin ever the dead come for the quick,
Be sure, Margaret, I'll come for thee.'

But she follows the departing spirit without waiting to
cover her naked feet ; and then there once more appears
the same simple child-like confusion of ideas which
makes the grave not merely the portal to the spirit-land,
but the sole spirit-world : —

' " Is there ony room at your head, Saunders ?

Is there ony room at your feet?
Or ony room at your side, Saimders,

Where fain, fain, I wad sleep?"

"There's nae room at my head, Margaret,

There's nae room at my feet;
My bed it is full lowly now:

Amang the hungry worms I sleep.
" Cauld mouH is my covering now.

But, and my winding-sheet ;
The dew it falls nae sooner down

Then my resting-place is weet.

"But plait a wand o' the bonnie birk,

And lay it on my breast;
And gae ye hame. May Margaret,

And wish my saul gude rest." '

15^

THE SUPERNATURAL.

Such confused ideas of Paradise and Purgatory, of the
world beyond the grave, the final resting-place of the
soul, and that where the body lies decaying in its
'wormy bed,' all illogically jumbled together without
any conscious inconsistency, is of common occurrence
in the early ballads. It represents the ideas of an age
in which a belief in the immortality of the soul had
been inculcated and inherited through many generations,
and was entertained unquestioningly by all. Such em-
bodiments of current popular thought may therefore
be accepted as apt illustrations of how impossible it is
to try by any standard of logical consistency the crude
attempts of the savage mind to define its beliefs on the
same subject. What shall we make — in view of such
illogical opinions perpetuated for centuries in the most
favourite popular forms, among a civilised Christian
peasantry,— of such nice distinctions as that attempted
to be drawn by Captain Burton, and quoted with highest
approval, of the negro's belief in a ghost but not in a
spirit ; in a present immaterial life, but not in a future
one ? On evidence which seems far more indisputable
than any definitions that he could possibly obtain of the
negro's discriminating belief between ghosts and spirits,
he may affirm that the Scottish peasantry of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries believed that heaven
and the grave were one and the same place.

Were our aim here to illustrate in detail the pecu-
liarities of Scottish superstition and the national fairy-
lore, the Gyre-Carline, or Scottish Hecate, the Kelpie,
the Shellycoat, the Wraith, the Brownie, or Billie Blin
of the ballads, the Daoine Shie or Men of Peace, as the
fairies of the Highlands are styled, and other cha-
racteristic national fancies would come under review.
But they are only referred to now in illustration of the

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153

mode in which such beliefs have been reduced to definite
form in the traditions and popular rhymes handed down
by the peasantry through many generations.

To a great extent the belief in the supernatural, as
far as Scotland is concerned, has been transmitted to us
unmodified by the refinements of a more critical age.
It is otherwise with the corresponding superstitions and
folk-lore of England. There the creative imagination
of a rare group of poets who adorned her sixteenth
century, selected the elfin creed and the darker super-
stitions of popular belief as material on which their
fancy should work its will. Shakespeare especially made
them his own ; and they have been transmuted into
things of beauty which supersede the elves, witches,
and lubber fiends that scared the old rustic hearth, and
made darkness terrible. The Queen of Fairyland and
all her elfin train are accordingly associated with the
romantic epic of Spenser, and the elfin-dream of a
midsummer's night to which Shakespeare has given
enduring form.

But the distinction between the visions of the two
Elizabethan poets is great. The former is wholly the
romancer, and we must be content with the enjoyment
of his epic as a minstrel's tale. The dramas of Shake-
speare, on the contrary, present an inexhaustible vein
of concrete philosophy ; though in a form so seductive
that its profound wisdom is apt to elude the ordinary
reader. They transmute some of the crudest incon-
gruities of vulgar superstition into definite forms no less
adapted for uses of pure science, than for the aesthetic
requirements of the stage. They transform into ideal
embodiments, available for all purposes of reasoning,
fancies before intangible as the creed of the savage,
which vanishes in the attempt to formulate it.

184

THE SUPERNATURAL.

li I ! '

The Caliban of Shakespeare, as we have seen, realises
the idea! of a being intermediate between brute and
man, defined out of the vague beliefs entertained re-
garding the inhabitants of new-found hinds in that six-
teenth century. To the same conceptive genius we owe
the no less dv°finite realisations of popular folk-lore : the
trafficker with Satanic powers, the conimuner with the
dead, the disembodied intruder from the world of spirits,
and the like impersonations of what formed the English
counterpart to the superstitions embodied in early Scot-
tish ballads. All this the most objective of poets accom-
plished for us in an age wholly unaffected by ideas
which now influence our conceptions of the immaterial
and the supernatural ; and th '^ in a way which renders
them available for fresh inqui ^tion into the innate ideas
of the vulgar and the sava^^e mind in relation to all that
is supra-natural.

;

CHAPTER IX.

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

'Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life at a pin's fee ;
And for ray soul, what can it do to that.
Being a thing immortal as itself.' — Hamlet.

THE ease with which Shakespeare sports at will in
the purely ideal and supernatural world of his
own fancy's creation, is only rendered less astonishing
by that still greater marvel, the ease with which he
moves amid the real world > if humanity, compassing in
exhaustless variety its every phase. Hence it is that
we dwell, above all things, on the supreme naturalness
of Shakespeare's dramatic art, his thorough truthfulness
and verisimilitude, his ever-renewing modernness and
universality. In a certain sense all this is simple enough,
— simple as Hamlet's playing upon the pipe : ' Govern
these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it
breath with your mouth, and it will discourse mo^,t elo-
quent music' It is simple, since it springs from no
mere transfixing of temporary fashions, either of dress
or of thought, but is the impersonation of the human
soul, its affections, its passions, its aspiration.s, its faith,
hopes, and fears : things which can never grow old-
fashioned or go out of date so long as humanity
endures.

Hamlet's directions to the players are completed
'with this special observance, that they o'erstep not
the modesty of nature ; for anything so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror

156

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

up to nature ; to show virtue her own feature ; scorn
liis own image, and the very age and body of the time
its form and pressure.' He is, indeed, only dictating
the actor's part; yet in defining 'the purpose of playing,'
he has in view also that of the dramatist ; and not less
so when, protesting against the strut and rant of the
player who oversteps the modesty of nature, he exclaims,
' I had thought some of nature's journeymen had made
men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity
so abominably.' It is from the lips of the wise Ulysses
that we listen to the familiar aphorism, ' One touch of
nature makes the whole world kin.' To this all Shake-
speare's art is referred ; by this it is ever tested.

' This to our blood is bom ;
It is the show and seal of nature's trutli.'

But though Shakespeare never oversteps the modesty
of nature, his genius has nowhere more strikingly ex-
hibited its creative power than in his varied realisations
of beings lying beyond the pale of humanity, and
unfamiliar to all our experiences. The range in this
respect is no less ample than the wondrous variety
discernible in his delineations of men and women. They
have moreover not only as distinct an individuality, but
they have an equally impressive charm of verisimilitude.
They .startle us less by any repelling strangeness than
his Shylock, lago, Lady Macbeth, or Richard III. They
are not the mere offspring of an exuberant fancy wan-
toning in its wealth. Each has a purpose of its own,
and plays its needful and altogether fitting part in
relation both to the visible and spiritual world with
which man traffics here. ' Macbeth ' has its witches —

• So withered and so wild in their attire ;
That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
And yet are on't.'

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

157

They arc the visible promptings of criminal desires,
impersonated as the witches of popular folk-lore, in an
age when King James deemed his ' Daimonology' such
an embodiment of wisdom that it was reprinted for the
benefit of Shakespeare and his countrymen when that
' wisest fool in Christendom ' succeeded to Elizabeth's
throne. It was, no doubt, as his exquisite tribute of
flattery to the sage king, that Shakespeare dramatised
the legendary history of Macbeth, and brought on to the
stage that Satanic agency in which his new sovereign
had proclaimed such implicit faith. This popular belief
was the very element on which Shakespeare delighted
to work. His was not the weak fancy which takes
refuge in that which is strange or unfamiliar, as therefore
original. That the fancy he was to sport with was
already familiar to the popular mind was one of the
strongest reasons for its selection ; and when he did
embody the ' airy nothing,' the very charm and triumph
of his art was that it seemed no more than the realisa-
tion of what all had known even from their cradle.
^The art is so perfect that no artifice could be discerned ;
and as they looked from the cock-pit of the Globe or
Blackfriars, into that wonderful dramatic mirror, Shake-
speare's Englishmen fancied they saw no more than
what they had been familiar with all their lives.

When the poet introduced 'the weird sisters' on the
stage, as beings of that antique and legendary world of
historic myth which it suited his purpose to dramatise,
he dealt with what was as realistically present to the
faith of his own age, as the fauns and satyrs, or the
Olympian deities, with which Sophocles or Aristophanes
peopled the Attic drama. His withered hags are sur-
rounded with all the properties of current superstition ;
and, with marvellous art, they are endowed with the

158

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

highest supernatural agency of such malignant emis-
saries of Satan, yet with no over-refined idealism to
rob them of their vulgar verisimilitude. Graymalkin
and Paddock are their familiars. Their incantations
are in perfect accordance with the folk-lore of the
seventeenth and later centuries. The brinded cat, the
hedge-pig and the toad, the potent charm of a wrecked
pilot's thumb, and the sieve in which to outweather the
storm ; while the bewitched sailor — for no better reason
than that his wife has withheld her chestnuts from the
hag,—

' Shall live a man forbid ;
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine:
Though hib L.nk cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest tost,' —

as the king himself had been, on his homeward voyage
with his bride ; and, as he doubted not, through just
such agents of the powers of darkness. The very
meanness of the vulgar agency by which Macbeth is
seduced into disloyalty adds to the moral force of the
drama. If he is to stoop to such baseness, it is fitting
it should be at the promptings of such beldams as
trade and traffic with him.

With just enough of the supernatural for their
malignant vocation, — the distillation of the moon's
' vaporous drop,' the ' yew slivercJ in the moon's
eclipse,' and the like mystic charms, — they ' hover
tlr ough the fog and filthy air;' or again, the 'secret,
black, and midnight hags ' surround the cauldron, with
the boil and bubble of its hell-broth of newt and frog,
toad and snake, adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,

* Tooth of wolf and maw of shark,
Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Finger of birth-strangled babe,'

GHOSTS AND WITCHES,

159

and all else that seems most loathsome and horrible,
wherewith to work the incantations that arc to lure
their victim to perdition. Thus while seemingly intro-
ducing no more than the familiar accessories of the
vulgar witch, Shakespeare elevates the weird sisters
who haunt the blasted heath into Satanic spirits, more
akin to the Eumenides of Greek tragedy : the agents
of hell sporting with the doomed soul, which has wel-
comed temptation, and so made itself their prey.

In ' Hamlet' again another phase of popular folk-lore
is transmuted with like 'eady art into the legitimate
agency of ' gorgeous tragedy in sceptred pall.' The
ghost of Hamlet's dead father haunts the old scenes
of life's fitful fever ; and, like vulgarest bugbear of the
village rustic, vanishes at the cock-crow. But with this
is interwoven another and more reverent dogma of the
popular creed, not yet wholly eradicated. The purga-
torial fires arc rekindled to show by their light the
disembodied spirit of the dead king. It is, as we know,
a character which the author specially favoured. He
personated it himself; revised its idealisation in the later
versions of the tragedy ; and perfected to his own high
ideal the impalpable spirit in visible incongruity, late
hearsed in death and quietly inurned, and now once
again abroad, ' revisiting the glimpses of the moon,
making night hideous.' It is, indeed, as this impersona-
tion of the dead king that the ever-living poet reappears
if we would recall him as the actor in his own dramas.
The majesty of buried Denmark, in complete steel, —

' The very armour he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated ; '

and yet ' as the air invulnerable.' With no other cha-
racter can we so freely associate the personality of
Shakespeare. We may think of him, with the help of

i6o

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

1 1

i 1

I L

1
t

Cornelius Jansen's fine portrait, in rich lace collar and
velvet doublet, such courtly dress as befitted the gentle-
man of Elizabeth's or James's reign ; or in plainer, yet
still becoming attire, as in the Chandos portrait, or
the Stratford bust. But with all of those the carping
critic intermeddles with doubts and questionings, such
as find i: place when, to the mind's eye, the poet,
impersonating one of his most marvellous imaginings,

' Armed at all points exactly,' cap-a-pe,
Appears before us, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by.'

He has realised for himself how a spirit should
walk ; how it should speak. We hear for ourselves the
voice of that unresting ghost ; the disembodied spirit,
clothed in shadowy form and vestments of the dead
father, as, in spite of fate, he tells 'the secrets of his
prison-house ; ' and all that is vulgar, grotesque, or
incongruous, is at once exorcised from our minds.

' We do it wrong, being so majestical.
To offer it the show of violence.'

But there is one appearance of the ghost in this subtle
tragedy, which invites special study. When first dis-
covered, it comes on the startled watch, stalking as it
were from out the void which lies beyond the castle
parapet, ' that beetles o'er his base into the sea.' We
look forth from the battlements of Elsinore Castle, into
the still night, with the ocean far beneath ; while over-
head

' Yond same star that's westward from the pole
Has made his course to illume that part of heaven
Where now it burns.'

Though challenged in vain by Horatio, as with martial
stalk it has gone by, the ghost is visible to all. It has,
indeed, repeatedly appeared at the same dread hour, and

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

i6]

been the wonder of fresh obsei^vers, ere it faded ' at the
crowing of the cock.' But there is a later scene (Act iii.
Scene 4), where Hamlet upbraids his mother with her
complicity in the wrongs of his murdered father, until
she exclaims —

' O Hamlet, speak no more ;
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.'

As he presses home the charge to which her own con-
science thus responds, in the midst of a contemptuous
anathema at the new king, Hamlet suddenly breaks off,
with the awe-struck invocation —

' Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings
You heavenly guards!'

and then he demands, ' What would your gracious
figure ? ' for the spirit of his dead father is once more
present to his sight. "3ut the queen sees nothing ; hears
only her son's words, addressed in deepest awe to ' the
incorporal air;' is all unconscious of the awful presence
and utterances of the visitant from the unseen world,
who owns an interest in her still. Are we to understand
that the disembodied spirit can be visible to whom it
will ; and that the love stronger than death, which sur-
vives in this ghostly compassion for her, manifests itself
in such forbearance .'' In the midst of its charge to
Hamlet, it suddenly breaks off: —

' But look, amazement on thy mother sits ;
O, step between her and her fighting soul;
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works;
Speak to her, Hamlet.

How is it with you, lady?

Ham.

Queen. Alas, how is 't with you,
That you do bend your eye on
And with th' incorporal air do
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;

vacancy,

hold discourse?

1; i

162

GHOSTS AND WITCHES,

And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hairs, like life in excrements,
Start up and stand on end. O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?

Ham. On him ! on him ! Look you, how pale he glares 1
His form and cause conjoin'd, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. Do not look upon me ;
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects : then what I have to do
Will want true colour; tears, perchance, for blood.

Queen. To whom do ye speak this ?

Ham. Do you see nothing therg ?

Qiieen. Nothing at all ; yet all that is, I see.

Ham. Nor did you nothing hear ?

Qlieen. No, nothing but ourselves.

Ham. Why, look you there 1 look, how it steals away !
My father, in his habit as he lived I
Look., where he goes, even now, out at the portal!'

And as the ghost disappears, the queen all unconsciously
turns on Hamlet with the exclamation —

' This is the very coinage of your brain :
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.

Ham. Ecstasy !

My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness
That I have uttcr'd : bring me to the tes|

And I the matter will re-word; which madness
W'ould gambol from. Mot]ier, for iove of

grace,
a.'

Lay not that flattering unction to yolij- spuf,
That m\ your tixspass p|it ^iy j^^aqjiess sbeij

In the ahaloffoiis scene jji ' lilncpel:!!,' w|le|-e the ghost

of Jianquo suddenly rises tn tlie iDanquet nail — invisible
to all hut t]]t. iisurjii I, \\'\\im- guilty soul |t appals, — the
apparition utters ito words ; and on tlie German stage,
where the dramas of Sjiakespeare excite an enthusiasm
akltt to that ot" the old playgoers of the Elizabethan
Clliibc or Blackfriars, it is customary to introdnre no
visible ullKiff, but to leave the effect to be r^aiisi'd m i

V ■

11 '

:.'^^9^m^iSll;^:-^.

. ■^^^■■ife.A'fci^-J-.---. .. ^/...u^^.., -.,:,

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

J 63

mere creation of Macbeth's fancy. In the realistic lite-
ralness of the English stage, the auditor has to reverse
the process, and assume the invisibility of Banquo to all
but the king. Lady Macbeth, after making light to
their ' worthy friends ' of this strange fit of her lord as
momentary, ' but a thing of custom ; 'tis no other ; only
it spoils the pleasure of the time,' turns on him with the
challenge —

' Are you a man ?

Mach. Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the devil.

Lady M. O proper stuff!

This is the very painting of your fear :
This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said.
Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts.
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire.
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done
You look but on a stool.

Macb. Prithee, see there ! behold ! look ! lo ! how say you ?
Why, what care I? If thou canst not., speak too.'

And so the scene proceeds, until at his

' Hence, horrible shadow
Unreal mockery, hence ! '

the ghost finally disappears, while the guests are sum-
marily desired by Lady Macbeth to stay all questioning
and go at once. To them it has been invisible through-
out the scene. It is an added marvel to the conscience-
stricken Macbeth that they should 'keep the natural
ruby of their cheeks ' in the presence of such a ' horrible
shadow.' To him it is too real to admit of a doubt that
it has glared on all alike. The impalpable apparition has
its ghostly presence anew impressed on our imaginations
by this capricious visibility. A discriminating criticism
can, indeed, assign other reasons for its invisibility to
the queen in 'Hamlet'; while to Lady Macbeth some

M 2

164

GHOSTS AND WITCHES.

critics assume that the ghost of Banquo is not less mani-
fest than to her husband ; though she has gazed un-
blanched on that ' which might appal the devil,' being,
indeed, the very creature of his work and theirs. She
has schooled herself to the worst. To her ' the sleeping
and the dead are but as pictures;' and she coldly re-
sponds to her husband's passion : * When all's done, you
look but on a stool.'

The ghost in 'Julius Caesar' is still more nearly the
mere creation of a distempered fancy. It does, indeed,
speak, and tells the noble Roman of yet another meeting ;
but the ear may be as much ' made the fool o' the other
senses ' as the eye ; and so it is with reason that Brutus
exclaims —

' I think it is the weakuess of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous vision.'

As to the ghosts that haunt the couch of Richard on
the eve of Bosworth's fatal day, — though they also utter
words more horrible than the vision which appals the
eye, — they may be regarded, like other nearly similar
presentations, as 'false creations, proceeding from the
heat-oppressed brain,' the dramatic embodiments of the
tyrant's nightmare dream.

' Shadows to-night
Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard
Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers
Armed in proof.'

So far however we see that the poet moves with
equal ease and clearness of vision in that shadowy world
of dreams and enchantments, as in his own sublunary
sphere ; and at the waving of his incentive wand, the
sports of fancy and the creatures of vulgar folk-lore
come forth and reveal themselves in consistent harmony
with all the highest .lims of dramatic art. But the ghosts

GHOSTS AND IVITCIIES.

i6.;

and the witches of this strange realm of fancy constitute
but a small part of the supernatural elements in the
Shakespearean drama ; and stand indeed in striking
and purposed contrast to the wanderers from Fairy-
land, the creatures of the elements, or the like airy
sprites: beings as unsubstantial as 'the air-drawn
dagger' of Macbeth, and yet each with an individuality
as distinct as that of the usurping thane.

\ )

Mil

i!i

I II I

CHAPTER X.

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

'Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.' — L'Allegro,

WHEN Puck is commanded by Obcron, 'the King
of Shadows,' who rules supreme in the 'Mid-
summer Night's Dream,' to amend the mischief he has
wrought, by wilful knavery or mischance, upon the rival
Athenian lovers, and to work new pranks for their un-
doing, that fairies and mortals alike may be at peace, he
replies —

' My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger :
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there.
Troop home to churchyards; damned spirits all.
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon.
They wilfully themselves exile from light,
And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night.'

In this the poet glances at those gloomier superstitions
which are more or less characteristic of all rude concep-
tions of the invisible world. They constitute its pre-
dominating aspect in the savage mind, and were by no
means wanting in English folk-lore. It is not to be sup-
posed that tho rude peasantry of England had fashioned
out of th€ Fcld~{df€i' or Dvergar of their Saxon or
Norsk fathers the airy haunters of their moonlit glades,
devoid of all such repulsive features as survive in

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

iT)?

the ballad-pictures of Scottish Elfland. To both they
were objects of vague apprehension. But the English
fairy, fashioned under more genial circumstances than
the wild social life and the rugged landscape of their
northern neighbours, was a tricksy and mischievous, but
not a malignant sprite. In Chaucer's ' Rime of Sire
Topas,' purposely written to ridicule the extravagances
of the romancers, the knight sets forth in search of ad-
ventures, and, in ' the countree of Faerie ' meets with
the 'gret geaunt Siro Oliphant,' on whom liis prowess
is to be shown. But, though it is a land of wonders,
where, as in Spenser's later visions, giants, dragons, and
monsters of all sorts may be looked for, its true fairy-
folk have no such repulsive characteristics ; and of its
elfin queen we learn : —

' Here is the Quene of Faerie,
With harpe, and pipe, and simphonie,
Dwelling in this place.'

The charms of Fairyland, which were left in Scotland
to rude nameless ballad minstrels, who perpetuated
without disguise the current superstitions of the people,
thus early took the fancy of England's greatest poets ;
and hence whatever was coarse, gloomy, and fit only to
' consort with black-browed night,' was eliminated from
its airy beings. But the gloom of this supernatural
element clung to the northern folk-lore. The persecu-
tions of the seventeenth century, and the grave aspects
of their later religious belief and forms of worship, doubt-
less helped to beget that mood of mind in the Scottish
peasantry which continued to find a charm in the
darkest superstitions of their forefathers.

Burns, in his ' Halloween,' perpetuates, towards the
close of the eighteenth century, with mingled humour
and gravity, the unsophisticated superstitions of the

i68

KlIJiY FOLK-LORE,

\\\\\

peasantry with reference to that grand anniversary
of witches, fiends, and all the powers of evil, which
by a curious association of ideas had been assigned
to All Saints' Eve. Then also the fairies were reputed
to hold high festival, and to be specially active in their
good or evil doings for mankind. They had power to
prosper or blight according to their humour. Household,
flock and field were at their mercy ; and they were
believed never to overlook a slight or forget a favour.
But though ' Halloween ' is specially noted by the
peasant bard as falling

'Upon that night, when faeries light,
On Cassilis Downans dance,
Or owrc the lays, in splendid blaze.
On sprightly coursers prance,'

yet the fairies are displaced by more prosaic and bane-
ful agents of darkness, in the incidents of the night.
They were already falling into disrepute ; while ghosts,
witches, and the emissaries of Satan were denounced,
but by no means discredited, by the ecclcsiastif^al censors
of the age. With a curious definiteness, unusual in rela-
tion to such shadowy beings as the fairies of Scottish
Elfland, Allan Cunningham tells us, ' it is generally ad-
mitted that they left our land about seventy years ago.
Their mournings and moanings among the hills on the
Hallowmass night of their departure— according to the
assertion of an old shepherd, — were melancholy to hear.'
Allan Cunningham wrote thus in 1834 ! so that it is now
a full century since the rocky downs of Cassilis, and the
coves and moonlit valleys of Scotland, ceased to echo to
the ringing of the fairies' bridle-reins and the music of
their corn-pipes and bog-reeds.

But ere the last echoes of fairy music had died away,
another peasant poet shaped their most favourite legend-

FAIRY FOLK- LORE.

i6q

ary prank into a rhyme of sweetest fancy and pathos.
The dreaded mischief of the Scottish fairy was the
transporting of children to Klfl uid, and leaving in their
place the unsightly changeling which figures in many a
village tale, liut out of this rude superstition, ("ommon
to the Scottish and Irish peasantry, the T'ttrick bhepherd
wrought his exquisite legend of ' Kilmeny,' a virgin pure,
carried off to Fairyland, beyond the reach of sin and
sorrow ; and returning but for a month and a day, to
charm all nature with a glimpse of perfect puritv and
peace.

' When seven lang years had come and fled,

When grief was calm, and hope was dead;
when scarce was remembered Kilmeny's name.
Late, late in a gloamin Kilmeny cam hamel'

But the vision of her return, though exceedingly beau-
tiful, is wholly fancy-wrought, and need not detain us
here. It is otherwise with Shakespeare's picturings of
Fairyland. In his day the fairy held his unchallenged
place in popular relief, and his bridle bells were still
listened fir in Charlecote chace. The poet accordingly
pictured the actual Fairyland of his age, though what-
ever gloomy phantoms still haunted I'^nglish glades and
dells were banished from his poetic vision. Hence when
the lord of Fairyland responds to the exhortation of
Puck for needful haste, since night's fitting time, when
ghosts and damned spirits alone venture abroad, is almost
past, it is to disown all such affinities. He acknowledges
no such restraints as those which made the ghost of
buried Denmark haunt ' the dead vast and middle of the
night,' and start ' like a guilty thing upon a fearful sum-
mons,' at the first morning cock-crow ; and hence he
thus repels Puck's reasons for haste, as wholly inappli-
cable to spirits such as they are. From choice they

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170

FAIR Y FOLK-L ORE,

court the paler light, and make their favourite haunts in
the moonlit glade : —

' But we are spirits of another sort ;
I with the morning's love have oft made sport ;
And like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all iiery-red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams.
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.'

The cock's shrill clarion has no warning dread for them ;
but when they hear the morning lark their pleasure is to
run before the dawn,

' Tripping after the night's shade
Swifter than the wandering moon.'

They are shadowy beings, unsubstantial as the moon-
beam, and therefore such as soft stillness and the night
become ; but with no affinity to the murky gloom which
Macbeth associates with his ' secret, black, and midnight
hags.' There is no confusion of the widely diverse ele-
ments of that supernatural world which played so familiar
a part in the realisations of popular credulity. With
nicest delicacy the poet discriminates between the witches
and other traffickers with the powers of hell ; or the
'sheeted dead,' and the unresting spirits of murdered
men, which haunted the age with gloomy superstitions :
and those widely diverse creations wherewith the fanciful
folk-lore, inherited from elder generations, had peopled
grove and flowery dell, woodland, marsh and lake, with
goblins, sprites and fays, best fitted to sport in poet's
visions. Of this wholly different class are such ethereal
imaginings as flit like rainbow gleams, playing their part
among the mortals who, ' in nightly revels and new
jollity' celebrate Hippolyta's nuptials in 'A Midsum-
mer Night's Dream ;' or in ' The Tempest ' help to light
Hymen's lamps for Prospero's more gentle daughter.

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

171

They are the refined creations of an exquisite poetic
fancy, working with the current material of what had
doubtless charmed the boy in the familiar fairy-lore of
the old Stratford ingle-nook, or haunted his nioonlit
wanderings among the glades of Charlecote Chase.

Among such familiar fairy-foik, Puck, or Robin Good-
fellow, stands out with exceptional clearness and strongly
marked individuality, playing his pranks on the odd
' human mortals ' —

•The crew of patches, rude mechanicals,
That work for bread upon Athenian stalls' —

who chance to cross the path of Oberon and Titania,
amid their revels, and their chidings over the sweet
changeling whom the fairy king would have as knight
of his train The elves and fays, with the jealous
Oberon and his wilful queen, are beings such only

' As youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.*

But the Puck of this midsummer night's dream is
such as could pertain only to one poet's vision. The
'drudging goblin,' is indeed introduced by Milton in
the 'L'Allegro,' among the fire-side tales told over the
spicy nut-brown ale. But the youthful poet is dream-
ing by no haunted stream ; but only telling, daintily
enough, the oft-told tale of

' How the drudging goblin sweat
To earn his cream-bowl duly set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn.
His shadowy flail hath thrash'd the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end :
Then lies him down, the lubber fiend.
And stretched out all the chimney's length,

Basks at the fire his hairy strength; . -: -,,^

And crop-full out of door he flings
- Ere the first cock his matin rings.' - - -

111;

l|l

172

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

Here we have the pop'ilar conception of the rude
goblin, a huge, ungainly kibber fiend, hairy as a satyr,
drudging with loutish perseverance for his cream-
bowl ; and when the bribe is earned, flinging his
unwieldy length before the chimney-log, like the
rudest toil-worn hind. But Shakespeare's Robin Good-
fellow is no lubber fiend, but a rare poetical embodi-
ment of the comedy of mischief. ' My gentle Puck,'
as Oberon calls that merry wanderer of the night, is
a knavish elf, who esteems it choice sport to have set
the fondest levers a-jangling by mistake. He delights
to play madcap pranks around the wassail bowl ; or
even to lurk in it, ' in very likeness of a roasted crab,'
cozening the old gossip in her posset, or toppling the
spinster aunt, who in the midst of her saddest tale
has been cheated into fancying him a three-foot stool.
He is, in fact, the originator of all the mirthful mis-
chances that seeming accident produces : —

' And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh ;
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there.'

The fairy messenger of Queen Titania does indeed
address him on their meeting as 'thou lob of spirits;'
but he has scarcely spoken ere she recognises Oberon's
henchman, who, at his bidding, 'will put a girdle round
about the earth in forty minutes.' The mad sprite
who frights the maidens of the villagery, and uiisleads
night-wanderers, laughing at their harm, is ready
to play his pranks on the Fairy Queen herself, now
that Titania and her fairy lord have quarrelled. For,
as he tells Titania's messengers —

' Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

Because that she as her attendant hath :

A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so si eet a changeling;

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

173

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild ;

But she perforce withholds the loved boy,

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy.

And now they never meet in grove or green,

By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,

But they do square: that all their elves for fear,

Creep into acorn cups and hide them there.

Fairy. Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow : are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery ;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, ,•

And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do tiieir work, and they shall have good luck :
Are not you he?

Puck. Thou speak'st aright;

I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Obeion, and make him smile.
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal :
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl.'

And SO the madcap sprite gleefully recounts his mis-
chief-makings, until Oberon summons him to spoil
Titania's moonlight revels, and bewitch her with
deceitful fantasies. The gravest meanings not infre-
quently lurk under the humours of Shakespeare's
comedy. The natural and supernatural are inter-
blended there, as in the living world and all the
simplest mysteries of life. ' Nothing happens by chance'
is a canon of the rustic creed ; ' Every effect has
a cause,' says the village philosopher : in illustration
of which, the poet, sporting with the folk-lore of his
time, educes harmonious solutions in relation to in-
cidents too homely for the theologian's care ; and by
agencies as remote from his ample faith in the super-

174

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

natural as from the dynamics of modv'^rn philosophy.
The mishaps of the dairy, the good luck of the barn,
or the laughter-moving accident to the gossip by the
hearth, are all the work of Hobgoblin or Sweet
Puck. The graver mischances of seed-time and har-
vest, which perplex the husbandman and rob him of
the fruits of his toil, are in like manner traceable to
fairy brawls. Oberon and Titania have fallen out, and

' Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs : which falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents ;
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain.
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field.
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; .
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest :
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods.
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound ;
And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose ;
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set : the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries ; and the 'mazed world.
By their increase, now knows not which is which ;
And this same progeny of evil comes
From our debate, from our dissension ;
We are their parents and original.'

And so, to amend such ' forgeries of jealousy,' Puck
steps in with his glamour. Titania becomes the victim

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

175

of his pranks, and is beguiled of her Indian boy by
a fraud as simple as the roasted crab in the gossip's
bowl. The juice of the little western flower ' now
purple with love's wound,' is laid on her sleeping
eyelids ; Bottom the weaver, ' shallowest thick-skin ' of
all the crew of rude mechanicals from Athenian stalls,
befitted with ' an ass's nowl ' instead of his own con-
ceited pate, is laid to sleep near the bower where the
fairy Queen reposes in fitting state, on

' A bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.

. And so it came to pass
Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.'

The harmonious interblending of such strange incon-
gruities leads to ever-new phases of gracefullest fan-
tasy. The love-beglamoured fairy forthwith entertains
her monster-lover with all queenly courtesies. She
engages to purge his mortal grossness so that he shall
thenceforth be like airy spirit. A bevy of fantastic

sprites, more insubstantial than the gossamer-web

Peasebiossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed, are
commissioned to tend on him with such services as
only fairies can render ; and the incongruities of the
enamoured fairy and the gross Athenian mechanical,
are wrought out in details in which broad fantastic
humour and the most delicate grace interblend in per-
fect harmony. Peasebiossom and his fairy comrades answer
their mistress's summons, and receive her orders : —

' Be kind and courteous to this gentleman ;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks an3 dewberries.
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries ;
The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees,

■

176

FAIRY FOT.K-LORE.

And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes ;
Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies."

And so the airy shadows of this poet-dream disport
themselves beneath the wandering moon, till the mortals
have closed their revels and withdrawn ; Oberon, recon-
ciled to Titania, has followed with their fairy train; and
Puck, ere he too vanishes, thus addresses us : —

• If we shadows have offended.
Think but this, and all is mended.
That you have but slumber'd here,
While these visions did appear,
Ard this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dieam.'

It is the same sportive inexhaustible fancy which
squanders its lavish wealth in ' Romeo and Juliet '
when Mercutio describes the dream-freaks of Queen
Mab, ' the fairy's midwife.' Yet Queen Mab and Queen
Titania has each a realm of her own ; and the two stand
out in striking contrast, with equr.lly diverse functions and
individuality. Titania is, throughout, the refined ideal
of the moon-lit dreamland over which she reigns. She
looses none of her queenly dignity by the pranks which
Robin Goodfellow is allowed to play on her. She yields
herself so absolutely to the potent spell of that 'little
western flower,' that under its glamour, she can disport
herself with queenly grace in the very arms of her
monster-lover. The charm of the comedy indeed lies
in the curious interblendings of exquisite fancy and the
sweetest glimpses of nature, with the lighter humour of
the play : as when Oberon is moved to pity as he watches
the favours which Titania is lavishing on the transformed
lout. The elves over wl 1 they reign are wont, like the

FAIR Y FOLK-LORE,

'77

bee, to * murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells.' On
duty bent, they ' hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear ;' or,
when afifrightcd by the wrath of Oberon and his queen,
'creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.' It is in
exquisite harmony with such revellers among the zephyrs
and the flowers, that their repentant fairy lord exclaims
at sight of his queen toying with her Athenian swain,
and sticking musk-roses on his ass's head : —

' Her dotape now I do begin to pily ;
For mecling her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favour^ for this hateful fool,
1 did upljraid her, and fall out with her ;
For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers ;
And that same dew, which sometimes on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls.
Stood now within the pretty flowerets' eyes,
like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.'

The incongruities of those ' four nights which quickly
dream awaj^ the time ' between the opening scene and
the arrival of the fair Hippolyta's nuptial hour, are in
perfect harmony with the wonderland of any midsummer
night's dream. The fair Hermia beiricked by Puck ;
Theseus of Athens and his Amazonian Queen enter-
tained on their wedding-night with the interlude of
' Pyramus and Thisbe,' played by Quince, Bottom,
Starveling, and poor Snug with his extempore roaring ;
and the Fairy Queen pursuing with the soul of love the
transmogrified weaver, her ear not less enchanted with
his singing than her eye with the grace of his hairy
nowl : all blend together as in the gay romance of the
dreamer.

The contrasts are equally striking, yet of a different
kind, which furnish the bold dramatic antithesis of ' The
Tempest' The princely magician, Prospero, engrossed

I I'

178

FAIRY FOLK'- LOBE.

by his researches into the mysteries of nature and occult
science, has been robbed of his dukedom by the per-
fidious brother whom he had appointed as his deputy.
Escaping the death to which he had been consigned, wo
find him with the sharer of his 'sea-sorrow,' an only
daughter, and his magical books, transported to that
desert island the localisation of which has already been
attempted in the geography of that ideal hemisphere
where such enchanted islands are found. There Pros-
pero reigns lord of nature and all her mysteries. His
daughter Miranda, so peerless in her perfect innocency,
has tempted us to some notice in a previous chapter.
Not quite three years old when borne with her father to
this lone retreat, she remembers only 'far off and like a
dream,' the face of woman ; and there she has grown
up, her father's sole companion, like a pure lily, the
unconscious embodiment of maidenly delicacy, a very
child of nature. She is not indeed without some fitting
education ; for, as her father says, —

' Here
Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit
Than other princesses can, that have more time
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.'

But though Miranda is her father's sole companion ; and
Shakespeare, or his first editors, have styled it an unin-
habited island : they are neither its first settlers nor its
sole inhabitants. The foul witch Sycorax, who with
age and envy was grown into a hoop, ' for mischiefs
manifold and sorceries too terrible to enter human hear-
ing,' would have been put to death, but for some un-
named redeeming deed for which they would not take
her life. So the sailors brought her from her native
Argier and left her on the island. This blear-eyed hag,
in the working of her unearthly spells, had enthralled an

FAIRY I'OLK-LORE.

179

ethereal being, too refined t.. be turned by her to any
serviceable account, and dying, left behind her that most
refined and daintiest of sylphs, Ariel. Prospero, in
whom he has found a more congenial master, and to
whom, therefore, he has done worthy service, is never-
theless the stern exacting lord, though he claims the
gratitude of his ethereal slave, and angrily taunts him
that he

' Thinks it much to tread the ooze
Of the salt deep,

To run upon the sharp wind of the north,
To do me business in the veins o' the earth
When it is baked with frost ; '

and so Prospero demands-

'Hast thou forgot
The foul witch, Sycorax?

■ Thou, my slave,

As thou report's! thyself, was then her servant ;
And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands.
Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee,
By help of her more potent ministers,
And in her most unmitigable rage.
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years; within which space she died.
And left thee there ; where thou didst vent iliy groans
As fast as mill-wheels strike. Thei. was this island-
Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born,— not honour'd with
A human shape.

Ariel. Yes ; Caliban, her son.

Pro^. Dull thing. I say so; he, that Caliban.
Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in : thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears; it was a torment ----,:
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax
Could not again undo: it was mine art,

N 2

i8o

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

When I Arrived and heard thee, tliat made gape
The pine, and let thee out.

Aritl. I '.hank thee, master.

Pros. If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howlVl away twelve winters.

Ariel. Pardon, mas'er;

I will be correspondent to command,
And do my spiritmg gently.'

And SO the airy sylph, subject to the exactions of this
imperious master, but now promised his hberty on the
third day, joyfully departs to assume the character of a
nymph of the sea, and in that shape to do his bidding.

Ariel is as ethereal as that other strange island-
dweller, Caliban, 'the freckled whelp, hag-born,' is of the
earth earthy. Yet he has a well-defined individuality
among the beings of that airy world which is his natural
element. He is a gay, sprightly, and even frolicsome
spirit, not wholly withoit the mischievous qualities
of Puck, but gentler and more refined in his spiriting,
and of his own choice seeking his pastimes far from
mortal haunts. His joyous nature does indeed derive a
pleasure from the successful mischief-makings on which
he is commissioned ; but all the while he is envying the
free lark and butterfly, and rather sports with his poor
dupes because of the commands of Prospero, than that,
like the madcap goblin Puck, he finds his own delight
in such pranks. For such 'earthy and abhorred com-
mands ' as the Argier witch alone had to lay on him, he
was a spirit too delicate ; but, though all the while long-
ing and thirsting for freedom, as we might fancy a
captive butterfly or honey-bee, there is nothing re-
pulsive to him in the quaintest of Prospero's tasks.
He tells with manifest glee of his having performed to
a point the tempest he was commissioned to raise ;

FAik y For.K'-r.oRE.

i8i

yea, to every article he has accomplished his strange
bidding : —

' I boarded the King's ship ; now on the beak,
Now in the waist, tlic deck, in every cabin,
1 flamed amazement : sometimes I'd divide,
And burn in many places ; on the topmast.
The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove's lightnings, the precursors
O' the dreadful thunder-claps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not : the fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake.'

' My brave spirit ! ' Prospero responds, in admiration of
such perfect fulfilment of his wishes, * who was so
constant, that this coil would not infect his reason } ' to
which Ariel thus gleefully answers : —

' Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel.
Then all afire with me : the King's son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring, — then like reeds, not hair, —
Was the first man that leap'd ; crying " Hell is empty.
And all the devils are here I"'

And so, having thus fulfilled th^ utmost wishes of his
master in relation to the tempest, ii is now able further
to report that all arc safe, ' not a hai, perished : on !:heir
sustaining garments not a blemish, but fresher than be-
fore ;' and all, as he had ordered, arc dispersed in troops
about the island, the king's son by himself ' cooling the
air with sighs, in an odd angle of the isle.'

Again Ariel recounts with liveliest satisfaction the
rougher play with which he has outwitted the drunken
conspiracy of Trinculo and Stephano under the guidance
of the poor monster Caliban. They are such pranks as
would have been peculiarly acceptable to Puck, and

i I

182

FAIR V FOLK-LORE.

seem to have proved in no way distasteful to the daintier
spirit to whom the commands of the Argier witch were
so abhorrent : —

* I told you, Sir, they were red-hot with drinking ;
So full of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces ; beat the ground
For kissing of their feet ; yet always bending
Towards their project. Then I beat my tabor ;
At which like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music: so I charmed their ears,
That, calf-like, they my lowing followed through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking gorse, and thorns.
Which entiired tiieir frail shins. At last I left them
r the filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell.
There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.'

Puck would have desired no chclcci' sport. But with
Ariel, though done promptly, and with a pride in the
execution of it to his master's utmost wishes, it is at best
but pleasant task-work, performed under the promise
' thou shalt be free as mountain winds.' His gentler
nature is shown in the child-like .simplicity with which
he recalls to Prospero this promised boon : —

* I prithee.
Remember that I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made thee no mistakings, served
Without or grudge or grambling? • thou dilst promise
To bate me a full year.'

Miranda does not differ more clearly from Viola, Portia,
or the wilful and v/itty Beatrice, than Ariel does from
Puck, or any other of Shakespeare's airy creations. He
is wholly incapable of the wanton mischief of that
knavish sprite, who on learning that by preposterous
mischance he has made Helena 'all fancy-sick and pale
of cheer,' by apportioning to her the wrong lover ; anu
set the whole wooers in the piece a-jangling : is even
more delighted at the mischief he hP5 wrought, than

FAIRY FOLK-LORE,

183

when anticipating the meeting of the charmed lovers,

he exclaims —

' Shall we their fond pageant see ?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!'

In striking contrast to this, Ariel is touched by the
human sufiferings with which he can have no fellow-
feeling. When he tells of the usurping duke and his
companions driven to distraction by their griefs, and
above all, the good old lord Gonzalo, with tears running
down his beard, ' like winter's drops from eaves,' he thus
addresses Prospero —

' Your charm so strongly works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Wot Id become tender.

Pros. Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ariel. Mine would, sir, were I human.

Pros. And mine shall.

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself.
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Pass;on as they, be kindlier moved than thou art ?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part ; the rarer action is
In \'irtue than in vengeance : they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go, release them, Ariel."

To Ariel we are plainly left to assume that this is the
more welcome duty ; to Puck it would have been alto-
gether the reverse. Their troubles would have been
sport to 'that shrewd knavish sprite,' who tells even
Oberon, when he has challenged him for his blundering
mischief —

'That must needs be sport alone;
^-^1. -W ... „ :-- And those things do best please me
j\i,: ■. That befal preposterously.'

And so, while we seem to feel a sympathetic joy at
Ariel's own release, as at the freedom of a caged lark,

184

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

listening in fancy to his delighted song dying away as
he soars into the limitless blue ; we are all the more
fully prepared to enter into the feeling of Prospero : —

* Why, that 's my dainty Ariel I I shall miss thee ;
But yet thou shalt have freedom.'

All other duties fulfilled, Prospero at the last com-
missions him to satisfy the promise already made, of
calm seas and auspicious winds to waft them homeward,
and catch the royal fleet far off, and so —

' My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge : then to the elements,
Be free, and fare thou well ! '

and with a swoop like that of the humming-bird which
has dallied long over some favourite flower, and then
darts swift as thought out of sight, we seem to see
Ariel float and soar away into the golden light of the
setting sun. The song of Ariel realises for us the very
thoughts and aspirations of such an embodied joy. It
dies away on the mind's ear like the thrilling quiver of
the mounting lark : —

' Where the bee sucks, there suck I :

In a cowslip's bell I lie ;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.'

For this exquisite creation Shakespeare had no more
material to work upon than the same crude shapings of
popular fancy and rus.ic superstition which gave him
the lubber fiend out of which his Puck is fashioned. But
there is a higher art in ' The Tempest ' than in 'A Mid-
summer Night's Dream,' beautiful as both are. The
pure poetry of richest fancy seems to entrance us into
the very spirit of fairy revelling, amid the marvels raised

FAIRY FOLK-LORE,

185

for us by Prospero's potent wand ; and then the poet dis-
misses all back to the realm of dreams. As in the
lighter comedy of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' Puck
lingers, after Oberon, Titania, and their fairy train have
vanished, to suggest that offence is needless, since per-
chance you have but slumbered here ; bo, with a more
solemn earnestness, suited to the dignity of the speaVier
and the incidents of the drama, Prosper© tells us how
all 'are melted into thin air;' and then, moralising on
the 'insubstantial pageant,' the 'baseless fabric of this
vision,' as but the type of all that seems to us most
real : even 'the great globe itself,' yea all which it in-
habit ; he adds —

'We are such stuff
As dreams are made on ; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'

We have thus analysed certain objective creations that
stand out with exceptional beauty or distinctive indi-
viduality of character, among the supernatural dramatis
personcB which people the world of art created for us
by the genius of Shakespeare. His witches, ghosts, and
other impersonations of purely superstitious fancy, have
their value in relation to the speculations of modern
science ; for the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies,
and in sorcerers or wizards by whom they can be in-
fluenced or controlled, is acknowledged to be almost
universal among the lowest savage races. As to his
Oberon and Titania, his Mab, Puck, and Ariel ; the
king of shadows and queen of dreams, the fairy, goblin
and sprite of popular folk-lore : they too have an
interest for the modern student of science, who can
value the tran.sformation of the crude imaginings of
rustic superstition into concrete forms of refined poetic
art. Artistically they command our admiration by their

Ill

t86

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

realisation in clearly defined individuality of what, till
Shakespeare embodied them, had flitted before the
mind's eye as ghostly phantoms, vaguer than the crea-
tures of our dreams. In this they only share with all
the other characters of Shakespeare's drama, that charm
of individual portraiture which makes each of them a
study replete with hidden truth.

Hence the embodied zephyr of * The Tempest ' pos-
sesses a personality so consistently defined, that we feel,
while entranced in the evolution of the drama, that the
doings of Ariel are no whit more improbable than those
of Ferdinand and Miranda, even in the exquisitely
natural glimpse flashed on us in the midst of a scene
which opens with Prospero in his magic robes, and
Ariel acting out his most potent charms. The magician
promises to Alonzo of Naples —

•I will requite you with as good a thing;
At least bring forth a wonder to content you:'

and so he discloses to the glad father's eyes the two
lovers seated at the chess-board : —

*/.//r. Sweet lord, you play me false.
Fer. No, my dearest love,

I would not for the world.

Mir. Yes, for a score of kingdoms ycu should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.'

Yet the moment we escape from the thrall of the poet's
enchantment, and its world of fancy fades into the light
of common day, we own to ourselves that 'our actors
were all spirits, and are melted into air.' They are
mere sports of fancy ; things of beauty for a perpetual
joy ; but impossibilities in the sober reaHty of this world
of fact and scientific realism.

So far we have dealt with Ariel, and the beings of
which he is the type, as fit subjects for literary criticism.

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

187

Viewed as an illustration of synthetic power, this creature
of a poet's fancy commends itself to every mind capable
of appreciating the highest forms of art. Shakespeare
had, as it were, the problem thus placed before him : —
Assuming the four primary elements of the ancients ;
and that they are peopled by such creatures as the
Rosicrucian Sylphs, Gnomes, Naiads, and Pyroads, —
beings endowed with natures each suited to the element
which it inhabits : what would be the characteristics of
an ethereal being, the ' "teller of the air ? The poet ac-
cepts the task, animates a zephyr, brings it into intimate
relations with the philosophic impersonation of active
human intellect, and places it alongside of the em-
bodiment of perfect feminine purity. It is a marvellous
creation of genius, which the longer it is studied yields
the more admiration and delight at the perfectness of a
conception so thoroughly self-originated. But what has
science to do with Rosicrucian sylphs or gnomes : the
airy nothings fashioned to people the elements of an
obsolete creed, which chemical analysis long since dis-
sipated? So far from modern science accepting the
antique creed of the four elements : its gases, metals,
earths, and other simplest chemical constituents of the
globe, already exceed sixty in number ; go on in ever
increasing multiplicity ; and yet include among them as
simple elements neither air, fire, earth, nor water. And
for such elements as it owns, chemistry has its own
spectrum analyses, eloquent in the truths ihey reveal.
Witn its respirators, its diving bells, its balloons, and
Davy lamps, science now makes its own sylphs, naiads,
and gnomes : free enough from competition with the airy
nothings begot in the fine frenzy of a poet's brain.

We resign, then, all claim to the scientific recognition
of these poetic creations, and dismiss them back to the

■' sS

1 88

FAIRY FOLK-LORE.

realm of fancy. But what of that being which the same
creative genius has produced for us in clearly defined
impersonation, as though he had received and accepted
this other problem also : — Assuming that the highest
forms of animal life and organisation are nothing more
than the results of evolution from the lowest, what would
be the characteristics of the brute when developed into
that nearest approximation to man of which the mere
animal is capable ? It reads like the old enigma of
the Theban sphinx ; and to it accordingly our modern
CEdipus, the most objective of poets, bent all the powers
of his genius. He has created for us a being fully
realising the ideal of that seeming contradiction in terms,
the rational brute ; and in doing so seems in all respects
to anticipate that hypothetical product of evolution
which modern science reproduces as the brute progenitor
of man. Yet Shakespeare least of all dreamt of a
human ancestor while working out this portraiture in
minutest nicety of detail. To him of all men the
distinction between man and his lower fellow-creatures
seemed clear and ineffaceable. Hamlet, in his depre-
ciatory self-torturings does indeed ask himself the
question : —

' What is a man.
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.'

But it is only that he may the more clearly infer that
man is no such mere animal, but, on the contrary, is the
sole living creature endowed with 'god-like reason ;' the
one being that exists in conscious relationship to the
'before and after;' and by virtue of such an inheritance
is responsible for the use of it as a man, and not as
a mere beast that feeds and sleeps. And so he thus
replies to his own challenge : — • /

FAIRY FOLK- LORE.

189

* Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.'

But, as Trinculo says, so soon as he casts eyes on
Caliban : ' Were I in England now, there would this
monster make a man ; any strange beast there makes
a man.'

The new theory of the origin of species, after meeting
with the wonted reception of all great discoveries, — being
hastily and rashly condemned in its earlier stages, and
little less hastily accepted by many so soon as the shock
of its novel comprehensiveness had passed away, — has
proceeded by rapid process of evolution to the hypothesis
of the descent of man. It has found for us an ancestry
which by its antiquity puts the line of the Conqueror to
shame. Nor will it allow of any evasion of this pedigree.
Only a very few years have passed since ethnologists
were divided into monogenists and polygenists ; and
the believer in the unity of the human race was laughed
at for his credulity But all that is at an end. ' If the
races of man were descended, as supposed by some
naturalists, from two or more distinct species, which had
differed as much, or nearly as much, from each other,
as the orang differs from the gorilla, it can hardly be
doubted that marked differences in the structure of
certain bones would still have been discoverable in man
as he now exists.' So says Mr. Darwin ; and so his
Caliban of evolution must needs find admission into
our pedigree as the undoubted progenitor and sole
Adam of the whole human race.

The Court of Heraldry has ever been wont to assume
an authority which admitted of no dispute. You shall
take its pedigree, or none. It had its three kings for

1 1

190

FAIRY FOLK- LORE.

settling such matters, when England was apt to find
one rather more than she could manage in all the rest
of her affairs ; and our Garter King in the new Herald's
College of science has determined a pedigree for us
even more dogmatically than Garter, Clarencieux, and
Norroy combined. We are ready with the admission
that all life starts from a cell ; that the primary rule
of embryonic development is to all appearance common
to animal life ; that the human embryo in early stages
is not readily discernible from that of inferior animals
very remote from man ; and recognise the whole very
remarkable homologous structure in man and the lower
animals. We admit that, up to a certain stage, develop-
ment proceeds with many striking analogies and some
startling homologies. But what we have to complain of
in the treatment of a question involving such far-reaching
results is that the modern evolutionist, leading us on
clearly, and on the whole convincingly, through many
remarkable evidences of development and seeming
evolution of species ; and recognising in so far the
essential element of humanity as to push research
beyond mere physical structure in search of intellect,
the social virtues, and a moral sense : just at the final
stage where the wondrous transformation is to be looked
for on which the verdict depends, we are directed solely
to physical evidence, as though brain, reason, mind, and
soul, were convertible terms.

Mind is the true standard of man. The perfection
of form is insignificant in comparison with the living
soul. We are not prepared to admit that the deve-
lopment of the brain of an orang or gorilla to a perfect
structural equality with that of man must necessarily be
followed by a corresponding manifestation of intelligence,
reason, and moral sense. Professor Huxley has come

FAIRY FOLK- 1. ORE,

IQt

to the conclusion that man in all parts of his organisation
dififers less from the higher apes than these do from the
lower members of the same group. Consequently, says
the evolutionist, 'there is no justification for placing
man in a distinct order.' But may we not also say :
Consequently something else than mere organisation
must determine man's place, even according to the
Liassification of the naturalist? But here it is, just at
the all-important point on which the whole novel pedi-
gree of humanity depends, that the needful links arc
assumed, and the supreme difficulties ignored. The
conclusion is thus dogmatically stated : — ' Man is de-
scended from some less highly-organised form. The
grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never
be shaken, for the close similarity between man and
the lower animals in embryonic development, as well
as in innumerable points of structure and constitution,
both of high and of the most trifling importance — the
rudiments which he retains, and the abnormal rever-
sions to which he is occasionally liable, — a.e facts which
cannot be disputed. They have long been known, but
until recently they told us nothing with respect to the
origin of man. Now, when viewed by the light of our
knowledge of the whole organic world, their meaning is
unmistakeable. The great principle of evolution stands
up clear and firm, when these groups of facts are
considered in connection with others, such as the
mutual affinities of the members of the same group,
their geographical distribution in past and present
times, and their geological succession. It is incredible
that all these facts should speak falsely. He who is not
content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of
Nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that
man is the work of a separate act of creation.'

in>

193

FAIR Y FOLK-LORE.

• It may be so,' said Newton ; ' there is no arguing
against facts,' when Molyneux comnuinicated to him
a discovery by which he fancied he had upset the whole
Newtonian system. But the curious thing with Newton
himself, as the type of man regarded from an intellectual
point of view, is that as science proceeds on that path
on which, to apply the words of his ov/n epitaph,
'mathematics of his own invention have lighted the
way,' it seems as if by intuition he had anticipated
later discoveries at every step. Lagrange's Calculus of
Variations, Eulcr's Integrals, with other more recent
and beautiful discoveries, appear to have been already
his own. He was wise beyond the capacity of his own
generation ; and ' by an almost divine power of mind,'
sounded the depths of philosophy, and revolutionised
the world of thought. And so is it with Shakespeare.
He was wiser even than all the requirements of that
grand era, which was in many respects so worthy of
him ; and, in the Caliban of his ' Tempest,' anticipates
and satisfies the most startling problem of the nine-
teenth century.

In the quaint setting of that beautiful comedy, amid
the fanciful triumphs of a spurious science that once
had its believers, and the creatures of the elements,
which then commanded philosophic faith : his rational
brute appears no less consistent and truthful to the
ideal of his art, than the Ariel or the Miranda along-
side of which it is placed. But when the revels of the
magician are ended, and the naturalist undertakes to
deal with the transitional being in its relation to the
sober realities of science and of fact, what place will he
assign to this Caliban of fancy ; and what can we accord
to the equally fanciful Caliban of evolution ? Is not the
latter rather a mere Frankenstein, still inanimate, the

FAIRY FOI.fC-LORE.

'9.1

counterfeit presentment of undeveloped man, with its in-
tellectual and moral possibilities an unsolved problem ?

Whether we study Shakespeare's harmoniously con-
sistent embodiment of the faith of the sixteenth century
in beings nat've to the strange islands of the new-found
world ; or turn to that progenitor of man, limned so
definitely by Mr. Darwin, so far as mere physical
characteristics are concerned — a hairy quadruped,
furnished with tail and pointed ears, arboreal in its
habits, a creature which, if naturalists had then existed
to examine it, would have been classed among the
quadrumana, ?.s surely us would the common, and still
more ancient progenitor of the monkeys ;— whether,
I say, we study the one Caliban or the other, is it less
a creature of the imagination ; is it more a possibility
of this world of our common humanity, than the Ariel
of the poet's animated and embodied zephyr?

CHAPTER XL

THE COMMENTATORS.

•Some have at first for wits, then poets, pass'd;
Turn'd critics next, and proved plain fools at last.' — Pope.

THE labours of a Shakespearean commentator take
a very modest and humble rank among the varied
products of literary adventure ; and the reception they
have met with has too frequently been such as might
well deter any but the boldest from following in his

steps.

' If aught of things that here befall
Touch a spirit among things divine,'

it would be pleasant to think of Louis Theobald reading
the reversal of the old sentence which doomed him to
the literary pillory for his patient and useful critical toil.
It had been his habit to communicate the results of his
Shakespearean annotations to the weekly columns of
'Mist's Journal,' and hence the allusion, erased from later
editions of the 'Dunciad': —

'Nor sleeps one error in its father's grave;
Old puns restore, lost blunders nicely seek,
And crucify poor Shakespeare once a week.'

Theobald's patient diligence was unquestionable, but it
was sneered at as the mere grubbing among waste rub-
bish of a plodding antiquary. He lived in an age when
the amenities of literary controversy were unknown;
and the friends of his great rival, recognising his infe-
riority in every element of wit and fancy to the satirist

THE COMMENTA TORS.

«95

with whom he had unhappily provoked comparison as
a writer of verse, adopted all Pope's prejudices in refer-
ence to his powers as a critic. Hence the disadvantage
at which he was placed in the battle of the books which
ensued. Warton styles him 'a cold, plodding, and
tasteless writer and critic' V>\\\. in this he confounded
two essentially distinct elements. As a would-b«^ poet
and playwright Theobald undoubtedly merited the
epithets of cold and tasteless assigned to him. As the
claimant to the discovery of ' The Double Falsehood,'
included as a genuine production of Shakespeare's pen, in
his edition of the poet's works ; and then as the blushing
confessor to the authorship of the one belauded passage
in its text, as his own finishing touch to what he still per-
sisted in assigning as a whole to the great dramatist : he
takes pre-eminence among the literary forgers of the
strange age to which he belonged. There is a touch of
sublimity in the apt impudence of the title, as though he
meant a bit of covert irony in his * Double Falsehood ' !
As a literary era it is difficult for us now to realise all
the strange inconsistencies of that Augustan age over
which Pope reigned supreme. There must have seemed
to Theobald's contemporaries and rival critics a fitness,
and even a poetical justice, in his advancement to the
dunce's throne, such as is lost sight of now. For nobody
thinks of Theobald as a poet, or recalls a single line of
his verse : unless, indeed, his own reclaimed forgery,
' Strike up my masters,' &c., in which he was supposed
to have added another hue to Shakespeare's rainbow !
But that, in spite of his promotion to that ' bad emi-
nence,' he should now be recognised as one of the most
judicious and even brilliant among all the Shakespearean
commentators, is a proof of how great his merit must
be in his own legitimate sphere. In place and point

O %

19-

THE COMMENTATORS.

of time he stands, as a critic of Shakespeare, between
Pope and the arrogant presumptuous Warburton. In
point of merit he is the suggester of not a few in-
genious conjectural emendations, now universally ac-
cepted, which the author of ' The Essay on Criticism '
might well have envied ; while his plodding industry,
in alliance with learning and critical discrimination, was
sufficient to have rescued the author of ' The Divine
Legation' from his undisputed claim to Mallett's 'Fa-
miliar Epistle to the Most Impudent Man living ' I

Bishop Warburton is a warning to all Shakespearean
critics. Of veneration, modesty, or diffidence, he took no
account. His aim seemed less to produce a ' Shake-
speare restored ' than to create a remodelled Shakespeare,
reformed from what the poet did write to what, in the
superior judgment of his right reverend commentator,
he should have written. Without some reverential ap-
preciation of the genius of the author, a revision of his
text can only lead to presumptuous impertinences ; and
not a few of Warburton's dogmatic recensions are sheer
nonsense, as where he declares of the line in Hamlet's
soliloquy,

' Or to take arms against a sea of troubles ' — '

' without question Shakespeare wrote " against assail of
troubles," i.e. assault'; or again, in Act iii. Sc. 4,
where Hamlet charges his mother with

■ 'Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;' ■ '^

and in the same vein proceeds to a climax, which nevc-
theless leaves the act unnamed : the Queen demands
in reply —

-J-— 'Ay me, what act, —- —

That roars so loud, and thunders in the index?' ,> i"

THE COMMENTATORS.

'97

The sense and aptness of the last line seem obvious
enough ; but in Warburton's hands it undergoes this
ludicrous travesty : —

' That roars so loud, it thunders to the Indies ! '

It is a warning to all who may venture where he so
boldly trod. Yet whatever may have been the pre-
sumptions and shortcomings of the 'critical herd,' their
labours have removed many obscurities and bkmishes
from the Shakespearean text ; while even the assumed
authority of an annotated 1632 folio, seemingly in a
contemporary hand, and edited with eulogistic con-
firmation by a veteran commentator, has failed to give
currency to a single reading that cannot win general
consent as a needful illumination of the original text.

But there is one class of corrections in which, in some
cases a happy hit, in others a felicitous acumen, has led
to valuable elucidations with the smallest amount of
change in the literal text. The experience of every
author much accustomed to proof-reading, familiarises
him with that mischievous class of misprints which sub-
stitutes an apparent sense wholly different from the
intended meaning. Among my own experiences in this
way is the conversion of ' brutified savages ' into ' beauti-
fied savages ;' or again the change of a sentence in which
I had purposed to characterise certain plausible asser-
tions as no better than ' clever guesses at truth' into the
transformed statement of ' eleven guesses at truth ' 1 —
changes literally trifling, which nevertheless wholly de-
stroyed the meaning. Shakespeare's text not only
abounds with such ; but they go on, in certain cases,
undergoing successive transformations in new editions,
both by early and modern writers, until the blunder
of a later edition is made the basis of an imaginary

xqS

THE COMMENTATORS.

restoration, very plausible at times, and yet altogether dif-
fering from what we have the means of shewing Shake-
speare actually did write. The temptation to the critic,
enamoured of his work, to fancy every ingenious literal
transformation not only an improvement, but an actual
discovery and restoration of the text, has of course to
be guarded against. Examples t * such fallacious dis-
coveries are plentiful. When Macbeth retorts to the
contemptuous upbraidings of his wife that he is

•Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' the adage,'

his reply is —

' I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more is none.'

Whereupon Lady Macbeth asks in the same con-
temptuous tone : —

' What beast was't then
That made you break this enterprise to me ? '

The antithesis of Lady Macbeth's heast^ to what *may
become a man', in her husband's exclamation, is so
obvious and telling, that the passage might be thought
sale from any critical tampering. But the amended
1632 folio converts the beast into boast ; and its editor,
Mr. John Payne Collier, goes into ecstasies over the
happy correction of what, he says, ■' reads like a gross
vulgarism.' In similar fashion Warburton travesties
a simile which least of all might have been supposed
to lie beyond the appreciation of a bishop. The dis-
consolate Rosalind, in ' As You Like It,' says of her
absent lover, ' His kissing is as full of sanctity as the
touch of holy bread.' So at lea.st read the folios. But
not so, says the clerical censor ; this is ' irhpious and
absurd,' and so he converts the beautiful allusion to

THE COMMENTATORS.

199

the holy touch of sacramental bread, into what he
calls a ' comparison just and decent,' by rendering it
holy beard, that is, the kiss of an holy saint or her-
mit ' I In my own copy of the 1632 folio, some previous
possessor has drawn his pen through the word bread,
and written in the margin hand: a better reading than
the bishop's, though poor as a substitute for the original
text.

The editors of the ' Cambridge Shakespeare ' remark
in their final preface : ' The more experience an editor
has, the more cautious he will be in the introduction
of conjectural emendations : not, assuredly, because his
confidence in the earliest text increases, but because
he gains a greater insight into the manifold and far
removed sources of error. The insertions, marginal
and interlinear, and doubtless occasional errors, of the
author's own manuscript, the mistakes, deliberate altera-
tions and attempted corrections of successive transcri-
bers and of the earliest printer, result at last in
corruptions v/hich no conjecture can with certainty
emend.' It is one thing, however, to actually thrust
into the most authoritative text of Shakespeare which
we possess, the fancies and guesses of the student ;
another and wholly different course is to offer such
guesses — when the results of careful and reverent study, —
apart from the text, as hints for the consideration of
fellow-students. In this fashion Theobald communi-
cated his early notes to ' Mist's Journal ' ; and in our
own day many a useful hint has been contributed to
the columns of ' The Athenaeum,' ' Notes and Queries,'
or other literary periodicals. ^_ _: „..^-,^ri,.-

In previous chapters certain of Shakespeare's dramas
have been carefully reviewed under speciai aspects,
and brought to bear on some points of interest in a

aoo

THE COMMENTATORS.

novel field of criticism. As it has been my habit as
a student of Shakespeare to note, from time to time,
such conjectural emendations as occurred to me in the
course of my reading, I venture to cull from these the
notes on the text of the two comedies which have
been chiefly referred to in the previous discussion.
The principle is a sound one which admits no con-
jectural emendations into the text because they seem
to make better rhythm, grammar, or sf;nsc, so long as
the reading of the folio is a possible one. Were the
prosaic rendering of Dame Quickly's description of
Falstafif's death, as given in the marginal notes of
Collier's 1632 folio, actually in the printed text, we
should feel compelled to accept it in lieu of Theo-
bald's felicitous suggestion, ' For his nose was as sharp
as a pen, and a babbled of green fields.' But when
the text actually reads, 'and a table of greene fields,'
it is so obviously blundered that we are free to accept
any good suggestion ; and few irdeed are likely to
hesitate between Theobald's happy thought, and the
poor commonplace of the unknown annotator : ' for his
nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green
frieze.' . -

The case is reversed in another example of conjec-
tural emendation. In 'The Taming of the Shrew,'
Tranio says : —

' Let 's be no stoics, nor no stocks, I pray ;
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks ■; ' :'

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured;
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,
And practice rhetoric in your common talk.'

Rowe converts balk logic into talk logic ; while Capel,
and an anonymous critic quoted in the Cambridge
notes, respectively suggest chop and hack. But we

THE COMMENTATORS

201

owe to Blackstone the happy thought of converting
Aristotle's checks into Aristotle's ethicks. ' Ethics ' comes
in so fittingl;,, along with logic and rhetoric, and the
argument so obviously is — 'Do not let us so austerely
devote ourselves to philosophy as wholly to abjure
love,' that the emendation seems one that might be
welcomed by the most cautious editor. But checks
makes good sense ; and as it is found both in the
folios and quarto, it is retained in the text of the
Cambridge edition ; while Blackstone's conjecture takes
its place as a foot-note.

This is at once the safe and true course. All such
changes are open to diversity of opinion. The text of the
folios, supplemented in certain cases by the quartos,
excepting where the language is notoriously corrupt
and meaningless, is the only authoritative one we can
ever hope to appeal to ; or at any rate must ever be
of higher authority than any mere conjectural emen-
dation. Nevertheless it may be thought at times that
the Cambridge editors have carried their conservative
adherence to the earliest text to an extreme : as
where in *A Midsummer Night's Dream,' a line in Ly-
sander's well-known commentary on 'The course of
true love,' is printed after the quartos, thus :—

•Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;'

though the folios render the word momentarie. Where
so obvious a choice lay before them, the later text of
^r the folio might safely be followed. The sole legiti-
mate aim of the Shakespearean editor is to restore, and
if needs be, to explain, but not to amend the actual
text; to give, as far as possible, what Shakespeare
did write, not to assume a censorsh ^ on his writings

202

THE COMMENTATORS.

which would be presumptuous when deahng with far
inferior authors. ,

Much of Pope's, as of Steevens' emendations of the
metre of Shakespeare partakes of the censorial cha-
racter. No two thmgs professing to be the same could
differ more widely than the heroic measure of Shake-
speare and of Pope. The structure of Shakespeare's
verse is strictly dramatic, prosody and all else being
subordinated to the higher purposes of the dialogue. He
displaced the rhyming couplets of the early drama ;
and, following in the wake of ' Marlow's mighty line,'
he constructed a free dramatic versification, partaking
of the licence derived from the Old English deca-
syllabics of Chaucer. Where the sense is better ex-
pressed by such means, the line frequently begins with
an accent, making thereby the first foot a trochee
instead of an iambus. A still more impressive effect
is produced by adding on to the beginning of a full
heroic line an extra emphatic syllable. Some editors
adopt the plan of printing this in a line by itself ; as is
done with the numerous half-lines purposely introduced.
Marked pauses of different kinds break the monotony of
a succession of heroic lines, and give pleasing irregu-
larity and naturalness to the dialogue. In some cases
the line is broken by the sense into two distinct parts,
with an extra syllable at the break, so as to compel
a pause in the voice. In others an unaccented syllable
is omitted, so that the voice rests on the final accent
preceding the caesura, before starting on the first accent
of the second half. Lines of twelve syllables are com-
mon, both with and without an accent in the super-
fluous syllables. An occasional verse occurs even with
two additional feet, while others frequently want a
foot. The licence of slurring or suppressing syllables

THE COMMENTATORS.

i^S

is used to an extent which could not now be indulged
in. Prose and verse intermingle, according to the sub-
ject, and the character of the speaker. A dialogue
begins at times in prose, as in Act i. Sc. 3. of ' The
Merchant of Venice,' where Shylock and Bassanio dis-
cuss the prosaic piece of business concerning the three-
months' interest for three thousand ducats ; but the
moment that the entrance of Antonio awakens the jealous
hatred of Shylock, the language becomes impassioned
and metrical. Falstaff never speaks in verse but in
his mock heroics, as where, in ' Henry IV' (Part II. Act
ii. Sc. 4.) he plays the royal father to the prince, and
* will do it in King Cambyses' vein ; ' or again, where
in loftiest fashion he addresses the new king, Henry V,
with the purpose of showing Master Shallow how he can
make * King Hal ' do him grace. The prince, on the
contrary, passes from prose to verse, according as he
condescends to the society of his boon companions, or
unveils the traits of a noble nature, and gives expres-
sion to his higher emotions. Even so in ' The Tempest,'
Caliban, though rude, is never prosaic ; and except in
the mere exchange of question and answer with Ste-
phano and Trinculo, he speaks in verse, while they and
the rude sailors are absolutely restricted to prose.

The rhythmical effect of varying pauses gives further
variety to Shakespeare's dramatic verse ; and additional
freedom is secured by the frequent use of the hemistich,
or imperfect line, not only at the end but in the middle
of a speech. By such means particular passages are
rendered more emphatic, and a natural ease is given to
the language of dialogue, while retaining the elevated
dignity which pertains to the measured structure of
verse. Shakespeare in fact subordinates the sound to
the sense, as he adapts the language to the character

S04

THE COMMENTA TORS,

of the speaker. The rhythm is maaj in each case to
respond to the exigencies of the dialogue, instead of
forcing every variety of utterance to subject itself to
the same artificial constraints of verse. The editors of
the Cambridge Shakespeare remark, in reference to
certain imperfect lines in 'The Tempest,' 'The truth
is that in dialogue Shakespeare's language passes so
rapidly from verse to prose and from prose to verse,
sometimes even hovering, as it were, over the confines,
being rhythmical rather than metrical, that all attempts
to give regularity to the metre must be made with
diflfidence and received with doubt.' -

Of all this, however, Pope, and the successors of his
school who undertook the textual criticism of Shake-
speare, had not the slightest appreciation. Thdy dealt
with him as an author of a ruder age than their own.
Hanmer is more irreverent than Pope in the censorship
exercised over the poet's metres ; and as to Warburton,
who subsequently united his labours with those of the
author of ' The Dunciad,' as a joint effort for the restora-
tion of the genuine text : he coolly sets them forth as the
fruits of his younger pastimes, when he ' used to turn
over those sort of writers to unbend himself from more
serious applications ! ' From such irreverent critics little
that was good, and nothing that was trustworthy in
the form of literary criticism, was to be looked for. But
the condition of the text both in the quartos and folios
invited to metrical reconstruction, for many passages of
verse are there printed as prose. Guided by the arti-
ficial standard of their day, their vain efforts to force
the measure of Shakespeare into the Procrustean bed of
their heroic pentameters, tempt them to endless cobbling.
Short lines are eked out with an added syllable, long
ones are abbreviated, by elision, by omission, or change

THE COMMENTA TORS.

20:

of words ; and after all, the baffled critics find that the
' native wood-notes wild ' will not be constrained within
their prescribed bounds. The increasing stuijy of the
elder poets, along with a truer appreciation of Shake-
speare himself, as well as the familiarity with a freer line
in the practice of our living poets, all combine to induce
a juster estimation of the versification of the Elizabethan
drama.

Amongst other progressive features in the develop-
ment of Shakespeare's genius, certain characteristics of
his verse clearly distinguish the earliest from some at
least of his later dramas ; and have an interest for us
here as adding further confirmation to the idea that the
literary executors of the poet took the virgin manuscript
of ' The Tempest ' fresh from its author's pen, and placed
it foremost in the collected works of their deceased
friend. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, in his ' Disquisition on
the Scene, Origin, Date, etc. of Shakespeare's Tempest,'
enters into an elaborate argument to prove that ' The
Tempest' is not only not Shakespeare's last work, but
he aims from internal and other evidence at fixing the
year 1596 as the date of its i,roduction. He indeed
claims it to be the actual 'Love's Labour's Won' of
Meres' ' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury,' published in
1598, in which that writer commends Shakespeare as
the most excellent among the English, alike for comedy
and tragedy ; and, enumerating certain comedies in
proof of this, he names his 'Gentlemen of Verona,' his
* Errors,' his ' Love Labours Lost,' his ' Love Labours
Won,' his ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' and his 'Merchant
of Venice.' Dr. Farmer imagined that the 'All's Well
that Ends Well' is the play referred to. In reality there
is no evidence, beyond such fancied fitness of the title to
one or other of his known comedies, as may readily

306

THE COMMENTATORS.

enough be assumed in the love's labour won of more
than one of their plots.

The precise date of the production of * The Tempest '
is not a question of any moment in reference to the
points chiefly discussed here ; and indeed the attempts
hitherto made to determine the order of production of
Shakespeare's drnmas from internal ovjdencc have ended
in very conflicting results. But it is worthy of note in
reference to the verse of ' The Tempest,' that it bears a
striking resemblance in one notable characteristic to that
of ' Coriolanus,' another of the plays which appeared for
the first time in the 1623 folio, and which is recognised
on all hands as among the later productions of the
poet's pen. It is indeed named by Mr. Joseph Hunter
along with three, or possibly four others, of his latest
plays, written when in his maturity 'his muse grew
severe.' Professor Craik, in his ' English of Shakespeare,'
dwells on the peculiarity now referred to, as a habit of
versification very sparingly introduced in the earliest
plays, and which seemed to grow upon the poet in his
later works. This is the termination of the line on the
tenth syllable, where ordinarily the true stress and most
marked accent should be found, with a slight unemphatic
monosyllable, Not only has this a certain unexpected
effect, by the absence of that rest and dwelling on the
syllable which the normal rhythm of the verse leads us
to anticipate ; but this effect is further heightened, and
indeed owes its chief force, to* the use generally of
relative or conjunctive monosyllables, such as and^ have^
that, with, for, is, &c., words which lead mind and voice
alike onward to the succeeding line. The effect is in some
degree startling from the absence of the expected rest ;
but its true value lies in the increasing variety and flow
of language, and the additional freedom of structure, in

THE COMMENT A TORS.

307

which dramatic verse legitimately deviates from the more
stately epic. In this respect Shakespeare's first produc-
tions differed from those of earlier English dramatists ;
and the whole tendency of his mind was towards furthc"
change in the same direction. Professor Craik remarks
of this specialty, ' it is a point of style which admits of
precise appreciation to a degree much beyond most
others ; and there is no other single indication which
can be compared with it as an element in determining
the chronology of the plays.' It seems somewhat in-
consistent with his idea that examples of this unemphatic
tenth syllable are so rare in the 'Julius Ca;sar,' that he
cites seven as the whole which occur in that play. He
does indeed use it as an argument for assigning an
earlier date to this latter play than to the ' Coriolanus ' ;
but the 'Julius Caesar' is one of those which appears
for the first time in the posthumous folio ; and whatever
its precise place may be in the chronological order of the
plays, it certainly is not an early production.

Before citing from 'The Tempest' examples of this
characteristic peculiarity of verse, it may be well to note
that it is not to be confounded with the universal licence
of ending a heroic line with the -ly, -ing^ -7icss, or other
like termination of a large class of words ; though more
frequently this constitutes in Shakespeare's verse an extra
unemphatic syllable following the fifth accent. In this,
as in all other prolongations of the line beyond the final
accent, the effect is to give richness and variety without
interfering with the rhythmical pause at the end of the
line. Below are a few instances of the kind of verse
referred to, as it occurs in * The Tempest.' The opening
line of the second scene is one not of ten but twelve
syllables, but it illustrates the peculiar effect resulting
from the closing of a line with an auxiliary verb, con-

THE COMMENTATORS.

stituting by grammatical structure a part of the verb with
which the next line begins. In this respect it has some
analogy to the terminating a line, and finding a rhyme,
in the middle of a word : which, though now employed
only as the extreme licence of burlesque extravaganzas,
was used by Spenser in the mottoes of his ' Faerie
Queen,' e. g.

'The Redcross Knight is captiv- made,
By gyaunt proud opprest ;
Prince Arthure meets with Una great-
ly with those newes distrest.'

If the student of Shakespeare whose attention has not
been hitherto called to this peculiarity in the verse of
'The Tempest,' compare it in this respect with the
known early works of the dramatist, such as his ' Romeo
and Juliet,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' and 'A Midsummer
Night's Dream,' he will perceive that it is a very notice-
able characteristic of a change in the rhythmical structure
of his dramatic dialogue, unquestionably pertaining to
the latest structure of his heroic line, as in the following
examples : — .

' If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.'

' It should the good ship so have swallow'd, and
The fraughting souls within her.'

' Thy mother was a pipce of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter.'

'I pray thee mark me, that a brother should
Be so perfidious.' ■ , ■ ;; ; t; .: ;^;

'Some food we had, and some fresh water, that - -
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, who being then appointed
:■' Master of this deJgn, did give us with '•

i-.— — ,,- Rich garments.'

' From mine own library with volumes that
" —-' I prize above my dukedom.'

.,K-.ri:.

THE COMAfEKTA TORS.

309

'A freckled whelp, hag-bom, not honour'd with
A human shape,'

' Would'st give me
Water with berries in't; and teach me how
To name the bij^ger light, and how the less.

'When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabb' !:^e
A thing most brutish.*

'Why speaks my father so ungently? This '

Is the third man that ere I saw.'

'I will resist such entertainment, till
Mine enemy has more power.'

These examples, all culled from a single scene, abun-
dantly suffice to illustrate the use of this peculiar metrical
hcence throughout ' The Tempest.' In no case does
the final monosyllable admit of a rhetorical accent;
unless possibly in the eighth:-' and teach me hoiv To
name the bigger light,' &c. But even here it is rather
the habit of resting on the tenth syllable, than the
meanmg or structure of the sentence, that would sug-
gest an accent; for indeed this is one of the numerous
specimens of dramatic dialogue specially adapted to the
character of the speaker, and which might be treated
as rhythmical prose. 'When thou camest first thou
strokedst me and madest much of me ; wouldst give
me water with berries in't, and teach me how to name
the bigger light, and how the less, that burn by day and
night : and then I loved thee.' In all the other examples
the line terminates with a word on which the voice
cannot dwell without doing violence to the sense ; and
hence the unemphatic break, with the necessity of
passing on to the next line, gives a novel variety and
freedom to passages of the dialogue.

Of an opposite class of lines referred to above in
which the line is broken, both by sense and metrical

2IO

THE COMMENTATORS.

Structure, into two parts, by the omission of an un-
accented syllable, the introduction of an extra syllable,
or the bringing of two accents together, so as to compel
the voice to rest between the one and . the other, and so
make the first emphatic, examples abound in 'The
Tempest.' Of these a few may be quoted.

' But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer I'—i. 2.

•Obey, and be attentive. Canst thou remember
A time before we came unto this cell?' — i. 1..

•And executing the outward face of royalty
With all prerogative. Hence his ambition growing.' — i. 2.

•We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd.' — iv. i.

' Who most strangely
Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed
To be the Lord on't. No more yet of this.' — v. i .

In both the characteristics specially illustrated in the
above examples, as well as in the gc.eral structure of
its verse, ' The Tempest ' is distinguished from ' A Mid-
summer Night's Dream.' Much of the dialogue in the
latter is in rhyming couplets, and the regularity and
prevailing uniformity of its measure recall the verse
of the 'Venus and Adonis' or others of the first heirs
of the poet's invention. Whatever be the precise date
of 'The Tempest' it is not to be doubted that those
two comedies so much akin in the fanciful originality of
their dramatis personcu, and the rich imaginative luxu-
riance of their verse, belong in point of time to two
widely separated eras of the poet':^' literary life.

r .^

CHAPTER XII.

THE FOLIOS.

^Prospero. So of his gentleness.

Knowing I loved my books, he fumish'd me
jTom mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.'— rie Tempest.

T^HE first folio of Shakespeare, which issued from
^ the press in 1623, seven years after the poet's
death IS the first complete and authorised collection
of Shakespeare's dramas,-complete, with the one ex-
ception of ' Pericles, Prince of Tyre.' It is a handsomely
prmted volume, issued with all accompaniments which
according to the fashion of that age, could give eclat
to such a literary monument of genius. One half of his
dramatic works, and some of these among the very best
such as :-' Cymbeline,' « Macbeth,' ' Measure for Mea-
sure, 'The Tempest,' 'Julius C^sar, 'Antony and
Cleopatra,' ' Coriolanus,' 'King John,' and ' Henry VIII'
appeared there for the first time in print The preface
shows that its joint editors, John Heminge and Henry
Condell, were actuated by all loving veneration for
their deceased friend : and when they there declare ^hat
those plays which had already appeared in print 'are
now offer'd to view cured and perfect of their limbs •
and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he con-
ceived them/ it is not to be doubted that they honestly
believed what they affirmed. They were actors, not
authors ; and apparently regarded the printer's share of
the work as a thing with which they had nothing to do.

P 2

212

THE FOLIOS.

I '

* It had beene a thing, we confesse, worthy to have
beene wished, that the Author himselfe, had liv'd to
have set forth, and overseene his owne writings. But
since it hath been ordain'd otherwise, and he by death
departed from that right, we pray you doe not envy his
Friends, the office of their care and paine, to have col-
lected and publish'd them.' So say the poet's literary
executors in reference to their labour of love. They
had, we may presume, obtained possession of all the
manuscripts left by Shakespeare at his death ; had
added to these the original manuscripts, or copies of
others, in the Black!: ian, ', • Globe stage-libraries ; and
completed the series, as the text abundantly proves,
by means of some of the very quartos which they
denounce in their preface as ' stolne and surreptitious
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths
of injurious impostors.' But all proof-reading was evi-
dently left to the printers ; and wild work they have
made of it, as many an obscure or absolutely meaning-
less passage shews 1

It has been a favourite idea of Shakespeare's com-
mentators that the folios supply, on the whole, an
authoritative critical text of ShrVi-speare; and unques-
tionably, as the earliest edition o ; jllected plays, and
the sole original text for one Laii t' em, the first folio
must constitute the basis of all texts k.-. rhe pLys. Again,
there is no doubt that the second, or 1632 folio, is cor-
rected to some small extent from the first, though also
it introduces blunders of its own. Yet it is, upon the
whole, the highest authority where no quartos exist ;
and it is on the margins of a copy of this edition that
the manuscript notes of Mr. J. P. Collier's famous text
occur. It is not necessary to enter here on the vexed
question of the genuineness or value of these notes.

THE FOLIOS.

2 13

But it will suffice to shew to how very limited an
extent the original text of the folio can be relied upon,
when it is remembered that the correction of minor
errors alone in this annotated copy are estimated by its
editor at twenty thousand. Many of these are palpable
blunders in spelling, punctuation, or such manifest trans-
position of letters or words as could scarcely escape
the eye of the first corrector, and had already been
amended by Rowe, Pope, Theobald, and other editors.
But besides those, the volume abounds in every kind
of error of omission or commission. The dialogue is

; misplaced as to speakers, in part or whole. Verse is
printed as prose, and prose as verse. V/ords are
blundered and displaced, lines are transposed, words,

, and it is believed whole lines, have been dropped out.

i Sentences are cut in two by periods and capitals :
making in some cases a sort of bungling sense utterly

., mystifying to the reader ; as in a well-known instance
in ' Henry VIII,' Act iv. Sc. 2, where Griffith, speaking
her best for the dead cardinal, says, according to the
folios: —

• This Cardinal,
Though from a humble stock, undoubtedly
- : rv ,, Was fashioned to much honour. From his cradle
?> He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one.'

To Theobald is due the simple but effective transpo-
sition of the periods which reconverted the plausible
nonsense of the printer into the true sense of the poet,
reading thus : —

'This Cardinal, ; >

Though from a humble stock, undoubtedly '•'

Was fashioned to much honour from his cradle. : ; -

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; ., .
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading.'

This being the condition of the best text we have to
appeal to, with such aid as the traduced quartos supply

ai4

THE FOLIOS.

for collation and correction of the folio misprints of
one half of the plays, it is obvious that abundant room
is left for the labours of the commentators. Their work
began in 1709, with the revised and corrected edition
of Shakespeare's plays by Nicholas Rowe, the first
attempt at a critical restoration of the text. A host
of zealous, if not always judicious critics have followed
in his steps. Poets, antiquaries, and scholars have
rivalled one another in the search for blemishes, and
exhausted their ingenuity in attempts to remove them.
Their joint labours and rival criticisms have accom-
plished much which is valuable. Yet even now, after
a century and a half devoted to such efforts, it cannot
be assumed that all has been done that patient diligence
and sagacity may hope to achieve. There are, doubt-
less, corruptions which no conjecture can with certainty
remove ; for even when the intelligent student is able
to offer a substitute for some meaningless phrase, which
illuminates the whole passage, it lies beyond possibility
of proof that this is what Shakespeare actually wrote.
But while a becoming reverence for the poet will re-
strain the most critical editor from unduly tampering
with the text, it need not preclude the most modest
student from communicating the results of his labours.
Any even plausible amendment of an obscure passage
may find admission into a foot-note, and be there left
to the judgment of the reader as a possible suggestion
or elucidation. Amendments in themselves inadmissible
have repeatedly suggested others of value ; and, even
when rejected as worthless, by tempting the reader to
renewed study, they often reward him with more com-
prehensive appreciation of the meaning of the original
text. In this sense alone are the following notes and
conjectural emendations put forth.

THE FOLIOS.

2IS

In general accuracy the text of * The Tempest ' com-
pares favourably with most of the plays in the first or
second folios ; and as it appeared in the former of these
for the first time, it is not improbable that it may have
been printed as already suggested, from the author's own
manuscript. But from the little we know of Shake-
speare's handwriting, it may be assumed that it was
not of the most readable character; and proof-reading
seems to have been carried on in the seventeenth century
under little or no editorial oversight, in a fashion which
admitted of very strange misprints passing muster in the
text. In truth the 1623 ^o^^o may be pronounced with-
out hesitation to be one of the handsomest and worst
printed books that issued from the press in the whole
century. The persevering efforts to restore a pure
text have not been expended without a fair per-
centage of very happy results. Sometimes by the mere
change of a single letter sense has been found in what
was before meaningless, and Shakespeare's own text,
we can scarcely doubt, restored. That many textual
imperfections still remain is not to be doubted. The
majority of these, however, lie beyond the reach of any
such certainty of correction, since the hand of the
master has been, not merely blurred, but defaced be-
yond all decypherment by some careless blunderer. "Vet
even with them carefully studied conjectural criticism
may still find room left for useful work : not indeed by
tampering with the text, but by supplementing it with
suggestive notes, which may at times restore the mean-
ing, even if it leave doubtful the actual words of the
great master, 'whose mind and hand went together.'
The severe critical test to which every such suggestion
is certain to be subjected, is a sure guarantee that no
merely plausible change will secure general acceptance ;

2l6

THE FOLIOS.

■i \

though where the text has been blundered into absolute
meaninglessness, any sense is better than none. ;*

In reference to 'The Tempest,' the version of it as
revised by Dryden and D'Avenant has a certain value
textually, though worthless in a literary point of view.
Dryden was born only fifteen years after the death of
Shakespeare at the comparatively early age of fifty-two.
As to D'Avenant, a scandal of the time reputed him to
be a son of the great dramatist. To such men, inti-
mately acquainted with all the traditions of the stage,
and to whom the language of Shakespeare was no less
familiar in its colloquial freedom, than in its choicest
phraseology, the correction of a misprint, or the sub-
stitution of a more intelligible or expressive word for
a doubtful one, could be done with a confidence per-
taining now alone to the diligent student of the Eliza-
bethan literature. Yet, as we shall have occasion to note,
the language was even then undergoing rapid change,
and Dryden kept no critical eye on the points in which
the usage of his own day already differed from that of
the Elizabethan age. Rowe, Pope, and others of the
earliest commentators, availed themselves of Dryden's
amendments on the folio text, and some of them have
been generally adopted. To him we owe the arrange-
ment of portions, such as the talk of Caliban, into verse,
in lieu of the prose of the folios. Of his verbal a.nend-
ments an example may be quoted, where Caliban ex-
claims, on the entrance of Trinculo, according to the
folio: —

• Lo, now, lo! -cT

Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me.'

Pope reads * now to torment me,' thinking perhaps the
repetition of the now^ as of the lo^ characteristic.
Dryden had already rendered it ' sent to torment me.'

THE FOLIOS.

fll

In similar points, more particularly noted hereafter,
changes are due to Dryden's revision, but they are not
of great importance, and some of them are not improve-
ments. In the same scene, for example, Prospero, in
describing to his daughter his brother's treachery, says —

•Whereon
A treacherous army levied, one midnight
Fat d to the purpose, did Antonio open
The gates of Milan.'

The idea manifestly is, that on that fatal or fated night
Antonio accomplished his treacherous deed ; and, as
Prospero proceeds to say,

*■ ■

• I' the dead of darkness
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me and they crying self.'

But Dryden feebly substitutes mated for fated. Other

emendations and suggestions will help to illustrate the

condition of the text. Prospero, having narrated to his

daughter the treacherous proceedings of his uncle, adds

thus: —

'Mark his condition and the event; then tell me :
' If this might be a brother;'

to which, according to the appropriation of the dialogue
in the folios, Miranda replies : —

' I should sin
To think but nobly of my grandmother:
Good wombs have borne bad sons.'

Theobald proposed the transference of the last line to
Prospero, as more consistent with the previous dialogue,
and with the age and innocent simplicity of Miranda,
as shown e. g. in the preceding interrogative : ' Sir, are
not you my father ?' along with his response. When he
describes their hurried banishment from Milan, he tells
her, according to the original text — which may be given

ai8

' THE FOLIOS.

here, with orthography, capitals, and punctuation, as a
sample of that of the folio : — »

• In few, they hurried us a-boord a Barke,
Bore us some Leagues to Sea, where they prepared
A rotten carkasse of a Butt, not rigg'd.
Nor tackle, nor sayle, nor mast ; the very rats
Instinctiuely have quit it.'

The Butt of the third line is rendered boat by Dryden,
and in this he is followed by Rowe. The Cambridge
editors, usually so conservative, adopt the alteration.
Mr. Joseph Hunter, on the contrary, argues for a literal
wine-butt cut m two, in spite of the inconsistency of
its desertion by the rats ; while Knight retains the butt
as, at least, more strikingly conveying the idea of a
vessel even less secure than the most rotten boat : as
it is common enough now to speak of a poor, ill-
appointed vessel as a tub. The ^nor sayle' of the fourth
line is a reading in which the second folio varies from
the first ; and most editors adhere to the latter as equally
indisputable in metre and sense ; but Mr. Joseph Hunter
thinks ' the second nor is added to the reading of the
first folio, to the improvement of the spirit.' It is an
illustration of much else of the same kind ; for here a
learned and most critical commentator adopts, I cannot
doubt, a mere compositor's blunder, and finds in it the
essence of Shakespeare's verse. Another example of
doubtful appropriation of the dialogue occurs in the
same scene. Prospero having described the services
rendered to him at the last by Gonzalo, the speakers
thus proceed, according to the folios : —

'Mr, Would I might

But ever see that man!

Pros. Now I arise:

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea sorrow.'

THE FOLIOS.

219

After the • now I arise ' of Prospero, the stage direction,
' Resumes his mantlel has been added by Rowe and
later editors. Collier's MS. notes render it ' Put on robe
again' ; but Blackstone regards the 'now I arise' as a
part of Miranda's remark, as though conceiving she has
heard all her father has to tell her ; and to this he
naturally responds ' sit still,' &c. Another example of
the original text will suffice to illustrate the orthography
and punctuation, in the slovenly fashion in which it re-
mains uncorrected in the second folio, where Ariel tells
Prospero,

•Not a soule
But felt a Feaver of the madde, and plaid
Some trickes of disperation; all but Mariners
Plung'd in the foaming bryne, and quit the vessell ;
Then all a fire with me the Kings sonne Ferdinand,
With haire up-staring (then like reeds, not haire)
' Was the first man that leapt; cride hell is empty,

And all the Divells are heere.'

Dryden here chan^^cs the text to * a fever of the mind,'
and is followed in this by Pope ; but the best later
editors retain it unchanged further than the indis-
pensable correction of the punctuation. Again, Prospero,
according to the folio, addresses Caliban thus :—

'Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, nor kindness I'

The substitution of not for nor by modern editors seems
to me a weakening of the text. Caliban is neither
moved by stripes nor kindness to any good purpose, in
Prosperous estimation. The address to him immediately
following, in the same vituperative style, beginning
' Abhorred slave,' is assigned in the folios to Miranda,
but modern editors have followed Dryden in transfer-
ring it to Prospero, of the correctness of which there

aao

THE FOLIOS.

is no doubt. In this passage Prospero says, according

to the folio : —

* When thou didst not (sauage)
Know thine owne meaning; but wouldst gabble, like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that made them knowne: But thy vild race
(The thou didst learn) had that in't, which good natures
Could not abide to be with,' &c.

Vild is rendered vile^ without the Cambridge editors
thinking it necessary' to note the change. It agrees
with the ' abhorred slave/ &c., of the opening part of
the sentence, but wild would accord as well, in some
respects, with the immediate context. It may be worth
noting here a similar misprint in ' A Midsummer
Night's Dream,* Act i. Sc. i, where, according to the
second folio, Helena, speaking of Demetrius, says —

' So I, admiring of his qualities :
Things base and vilde, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to foime and dignity.'

Here Knight reads ' base and vild,' explaining the word
in a foot-note as vile. No commentator, so far as I am
aware, has suggested another change, which appears to
me worthy of consideration, and may as well be noted
now as later, viz. quality for quantity. I may notice
here also an example of the way in which the blunders
of one edition are liable to be made the basis of
false emendations in another. In Act i. Sc. 2, where
Prospero suddenly changes his manner towards Fer-
dinand, ' lest too light winning make the prize light,'
Miranda demands, appealingly, 'Why speaks my father
so ungently?' but this, by a misprint in the second
folio, becomes urgently ; and some former possessor of
my copy has drawn his pen through it, and written in
the margin grudgingly. The paucity of stage directions
is another evidence of the absence of proper editorial

THE FOLIOS.

oversight in the folios, as where, in Act i. Sc. i,
Prospero says —

' It works : come on,

Thou hast done well, fine Ariel : follow me.

Hark what thou else shalt do me.'

So it is printed in the folio, whereas the context clearly
shews that the first two words are an aside, — Prospero's
thought uttered audibly. The two commands, 'come
on,' and 'follow me,' are addressed to Ferdinand, the
rest is for Ariel. Two alterations on Ariel's song were
made by Theobald, and have taken their place in the
current text, though neither is justified by any ob-
scurity in the original. He reads, ' Where the bee sucks
there lurk I,' instead of ''stick I,' and 'After sunset
merrily,' instead of summer^ or, as it is in the folio
sommer. The associations with the fine music of Dr.
Arne have so familiarised all with the altered version ;
and both in sound, and in association with the bat's wing,
there is such an aptness in the latter change, that the
restored text is apt to be felt unacceptable at first. But
on any principle of sound criticism this seems an
attempt to change, so far as we know, what Shakespeare
did write, into what he ought to have written.

The following are the results of the author's own
reading and annotation of the two plays specially re-
ferred to. They are by no means produced as undoubted
emendatioiiS of the text, but merely as the conjectures
of a Shakespeare student, on points which are for tlie
most part admittedly doubtful or obscure.

CHAPTER XIII.

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.*

' The best in this kind are but shadows ; and the worst are no worse
if imagination amend them.' — A Midsummer Nigbl^ Dream.

THE sole authority for the text of * The Tempest' is
the 1623 folio, with whatever editorial supervision
or appeal to an original manuscript may be supposed
to have guided the revisers of the second and subse-
quent folios. The text ' on the whole, free from gross
blunders, and much mc "rect than other plays in the

volume ; but obscurities and undoubted errors do exist,
with some of which the following notes attempt to deal
conjecturally. ' .^ .;

ACT I. Scene I.

The rough dialogue of the first scene is purposely
constructed in striking contrast to what follows, and is
less open to rigid criticism. But Mr. Richard Grant
White has not thought even the ' Boson,' or * Boatswain,'
undeserving of note in his ' Shakespeare's Scholar.' Fol-
lowing his example, a trifling change may be noted as
perhaps admissible in the Boatswain's words : ' Bring
her to try with main-course.' In the folio it is printed
* bring her to Try with Maine-course.' The capital
suggests this as possibly the true reading : * Bring her
too. Try with main course.'

NOTES ON ' T//E TEMPEST'

Scene II.

• Pros, filing once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them ; whom to advance, and whom
To trash for overtopping.'

Knight explains trash as 'a term still in use among
hunters, to denote a piece of leather, couples, or any
other weight, fastened round the neck of a dog, when
his speed is superior to the rest of the pack ; i. e. when
he overtops them, when he hunts too quick.' This in-
terpretation seems more like an afterthought, devised to
make the explanation fit on to the text. The meaning
seems rather that the crafty deputy had learned how
to grant and how to deny suits ; whom to promote and
whom to overtop, i. e. over whom to promote others, his
own creatures. The only other example of the use of
the latter word is where, in 'Antony and Cleopatra,'
Antony exclaims, * All is lost,' and then adds, ' this pine
is barked that overtopped them all.' This is in ac-
cordance with the use ascribed to it in Prospero's allusion.
As to the doubtful word trash, it is repeatedly used by
Shakespeare in its ordinary sense of worthless. But
in one passage in which, as usually rendered, Knight's
interpretation of its special significance in 'The Tempest'
seems borne out, he finds an entirely new meaning for
it. In • Othello,' Act ii. Sc. i, where lago is meditating
his purposed use of Cassio's name to awaken in the
Moor his fatal jealousy, he exclaims, according to the
Cambridge, as well as earlier texts : —

• Which thing to do,
If this poor trash of Venice, whom I trash
For his quick hunting, stand the putting on,
I'll have our Michael Cassio on the hip.'

In reality, however, the use of the same word in two

NOTES ON * THE TEMPEST.

totally different senses is the work of the commentators.
The first quarto has crush in place of the latter trash;
while the second and third quartos and the folios have
trace. Knight accordingly, adopting the latter reading,
adds this note : ' The noun trashy and the verb trace, are
used with perfect propriety. The trash is the thing traced,
put in traces, confined — as an untrained worthless dog
is held ; and hence the present meaning of trashy This
is not the only case where Knight seems to fit a meaning
for the occasion. The commentators, dissatisfied with
either of the old readings, have variously suggested
leash, train, trash, cherish ; the last, and most unsuitable
one, being Warburton's. It is in its ordinary sense, as
where lago speaks of ' this poor trash of Venice,' that
the word is everywhere else used by Shakespeare, unless
in the reference by Prospero to his brother's perfidious
policy. When, in a later scene (Act iv. Sc. i.), Stephano
and Trinculo yield to the temptation of the ' glistering
apparel' purposely hung up by Ariel ' for stale to catch
these thieves,' Caliban exclaims, * Let it alone ; it is but
trash.' But the passage in Prospero's speech appears to
have been recognised as obscure or faulty by the first
editors ; and it is accordingly changed conjecturally in
the second folio. As printed in the 1623 folio, the text
reads ' who t' advance, and who to trash,' which suggests
to me a very possible misprint for —

' Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them ; who to advance, and who
Tqo raih for overtopping.'

That is to say, who were fit to be promoted, and who
were too rash to be advanced over old servitors. Pros-
pero accordingly goes on to say that he ' new created
the creatures that were mine ; ' either * changed them,
or else new formed them.' In this way the original text

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST'

225

I ■ V

is adhered to more closely ; and yet, by the alteration of
a single letter, a clear meaning is given to what was
formerly obscure.

'Pros. He being thus lorded,

Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact, like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it.
Made such a sinner of his memory.
To credit his own lie, he did believe
He was indeed the duke.'

This passage has occupied the commentators with
very diverse efforts at its elucidation. Hanmer reads,
lovmg an untruth^ ajid telling V ofi; Warburton, having
unto trttth, by telling oft ; Musgrave, having sinned to
truth by telling V oft ; the Collier folio, besides changing
lorded into loaded, renders the later line. Who having
to untruth, by telling of it; and its editor adds, 'There
cannot be a doubt that this, as regards untruth at least,
is the language of Shakespeare.'

Query : —

Who hating an imtruth.

Prosper© says, ' My trust, like a good parent, did beget
of him a falsehood.' It seems in the same vein of
reasoning to say of him so trusted, that he resembled
one who, originally hating an untruth, ended by
believing his own lie.

' Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough ; of temporal royalties
■ He thinks me now incapable; confederates,

'. So dry he was for sway, wi' the King of Naples
To give him annual tribute, do him homage,
Subject his coronet to his crown.'

It may be worth noting, that in the first folio it is
temporall roalties ; in the second folio it becomes

aa6

NOTES ON 'TH>: TEMPEST.'

roialties. But why ' temporal royalties' ? There were
no spiritual ones in question. The reference may be
presumed to be to Prospero's supernatural rule, but to
this he has made no allusion. He has only spoken of
himself as ' rapt in secret studies,' and

' Neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated >.

To closeness and the bettering of my mind '«

With that which, but by being so retired, ' ')<>.'

O'erprized all popular rate.' . . '; >

Probably royalties is the true word ; but the change of
a single letter, in the first folio, would give realties^ a
word contrasting with the supernatural things to which,
by any interpretation, temporal must have reference;
and to which, as afterwards appears, the ' secret studies '
refer.

' Subject his coronet to his crown.' As in Shake-
speare's day his was the neuter, as well as the masculine
possessive form, this may be read as equivalent to —
* Subject its coronet to his crown.' It was the coronet of
Milan, but not yet of Antonio. There remains one other
word, more clearly open to objection — * So dry he was
for sway.' In the folios it is drie.

Query : —

So ripe he was for sway.

"■Pros. Now the condition.

This king of Naples, being an enemy
To me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit;
Which was, that he, in lieu o' the premises.
Of homage and I know not how much tribute.'

Knight explains this, ' The premises of homage^ &c. — the
circumstances of homage /r^ww^^.'

Query: —

Of homage.

in view o' the promises

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.'

227

'-P'""*- Thou didst smile. '

Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt, -

Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.'

The commentators have manifested their recognition
of some defect by proposing such changes as these :
Hanmer reads for 'deck'd/ bracked; Warburton, mock'd-,
Johnson, /,?f/^'^; and Reed, deg^d.

Query: —

_ . Thou didst smile,

Infused with a fortitude from heaven.
When I have lack'd. The sea, with drops full salt.
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me. &c.

'Pros. This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child.'

Sycorax is spoken of with every term of loathing • as
a ' foul witch,' a ' hag,' a ' damned witch,' &c. There
seems no propriety in coupling with these the term
blue-eyed— one of the tokens, according to Rosalind, in
'As You Like It,' whereby to know a man in love. In
the first and second folios it is ' blew ey'd.' Query :—
blear-eyed, or bleared.

'f''°'- Thy groans

Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears.'

Query : — of even angry bears.

''P'"°*- Urchins

Shall, for that vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee.'

Query -.—shall forth at vast of night. ^

The term vast is sanctioned by its use in ' Hamlet,'
where Horatio says, ' In the dead vast and middle of the

Q 2

228

NOTES ON * THE TEMPEST'

111

night ; ' so at least it stands in three of the quartos,
though in two others it is rendered wast. This becomes
in the folios waste, and by Malone is converted into
waist,

' Pros. One word more ; I charge thee

That thou attend me : thou dost here usurp
The name thou owest not.'

Query :-

One word more : I charge thee —
Dost thou attend me? — thou dost here usurp, &c.

'Mir. O, dear father,

Make not too rash a trial of him, for
He's gentle and not fearful.

Pros. What 1 I say,

My foot my tutor? '

In this passage the former owner of my 1632 folio
has changed rash into harsh — an ingenious, but certainly
false conjecture ; for Miranda, not less regardful of her
father than her lover, says : — Do not too rashly put his
forbearance to the test, for he is no churl, but of gentle
blood and courage. Another correction by the same
hand deals with a word already recognised as doubtful.
Dryden changes foot into child ; Walker suggests fool ;
the same unknown annotator corrects it thus : — ' What,
I say, foolish, — my tutor ! '

ACT II. Scene I.

' Gob. How lush and lusty the grass looks ! how green ! '

The word lush is of doubtful origin and significance.
Henley affirms it to mean 'rank'; Malone, 'juicy'; Knight
quotes the word lushy as applied to a drunkard ;
R. Grant White suggests it to be a corruption of

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.'

luscious. Is it too simple a suggestion that the word
was fresh} The manuscript would readily admit of
such a misreading.

'<S«6. Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye,
Who hath cause to wet the grief on't.

Alan. Prithee, peace.

Seh. You were kneel'd to and importun'd otherwise,
By all of us ; and the fair soul herself
Weigh'd between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam should bow.'

Query :—

to weigh the grief on't.

Swayed between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam she 'd bow.

The folios have the word waigJCd, which I had noted
conjecturally on my own copy as a misprint for swayed.
From the Cambridge Shakespeare it appears that S.
Verges has already suggested this, though its editors
overlook the suggestive orthography of the folio. The
she'd^ instead of should^ is Malone's, and adopted by
Knight. By dropping the at of the previous line, the
should would be more expressive. But, as has already
been shewn, the at^ so placed, is highly characteristic of
the peculiar metre of this and one or two other of
Shakespeare's latest plays.

* Ant, I am more serious than my custom ; you
Must be so too, if heed me; which to do
Trebles thee o'er.'

What does Trebles thee o'er mean here .-* Looking at it
in its relation to the context, it has to be borne in re-
membrance that Antonio, himself a traitorous usurper, is
making the first suggestion of treason, in purposedly
obscured hints, to Sebastian, the king of Naples' brother.
The king lies asleep ; his son, the heir to the crown, is

330

NOTES ON *THE TEMPEST*

believed to be drowned ; and a few sentences further on
the suggestion assumes this undisguised shape : —

• Here lies your brother,
No better than the earth he lies upon,
If he were that which now he's like, that's dead;
Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it,
Can lay to bed for ever.'

In the folios the text reads — Trehbles thee dre. Pope
renders it Troubles thee o'er; Hanmer, Troubles thee not.

Query: — -

I am more serious than my custom ; you
Must be so too, if — heed me, — which to do't
Rebels thee o'er.

The previous talk with Gonzalo, and the darker hints
since, have been carried on with quip, pun, and inuendo.
If we understand Sebastian's reply, ' Well, I am standing
water,' as a play on the word rebels, i. e. ' ripples thee
o'er' it is no worse pun than others which have preceded
it ; and hence follows metaphorical talk of flowing,
ebbing, and running near the bottom.

'■Ant. She that from Naples

Can have no note, unless the sun were post, —
The man i' the moon's too slow, — till new-bom chins
Be rough and razorable; she that from whom
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again.'

Query:—

She from whom \'q
All were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again.

This is equivalent to * She, coming from whom,' &c.
Otherwise it might read, ' She for whom we.' The
earlier line, * She that from Naples,' may have misled
the compositor in this subsequent line, as in similp.r
cases. Mr. Spedding suggests to the Cambridge editors,
* She that — From whom } All were sea-swallow'd,' &c.,

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST:

2.^1

making the * From whom ' an interjectional reference to
the previous ' She can have no note from Naples till
new-born babies have beards to shave!' Rowe, Pope,
Singer, and other commentators, all concur in recog-
nising some defect in the text

* Ant. There be that can nile Naples

As well as he that sleeps: lords that can prate
As amply and as unnecessarily
As this Gonzalo : I myself could make
A chough of as deep chat.

Query : —

A chough give as deep chat.

ts
o.

:e
td

c.
e
d
r

Scene II.

*Cal. I'll bring thee

To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock.*

Scamels is the word in the folios It has been con-
jecturally amended, seamalls, sea-mews, stannels, and
shamois ; the last being Theobald's. Hunter thinks
the word scamels genuine, because 'as it stands it
gives us a very melodious line,' and also from ' the
difficulty of finding a word which the printer may
be supposed to have mistaken.' Nevertheless he
suggests samphire. Caliban ha? said just before, * I
with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts,' so that
something simple may be assumed.

Query muscles. It fulfils one of Mr. Hunter's
requirements, being nearly a transposition of the
letters, and is more likely than either shamois or
samphire. The special luxury of ' young muscles from
the rock' may also fitly contrast with the previous
threat of Prospero to Ferdinand : * Thy food shall be
the fresh-brook muscles.'

233

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.'

ACT III. Scene I. \ '

* Fer. r My sweet mistress

Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness
Had never like executor. I forget:
But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours
Most busy lest, when I do it.'

The reading of the last Hne has been the subject of a
multitude of conjectures. The lest of the first folio
becomes least in the second. Pope reads least busy,
Theobald, most busie-less, and so on, through busiest, busy
felty busy still, busiliest, of a succession of commentators,
crowned with Collier's folio marginal note of most busy-
blest.

Query:—

Do even refresh my labour
Most baseless when I do it.

Baseless would thus stand in apposition to the baseness
of his previous comment : ' Some kinds of baseness are
nobly undergone,' &c.

'Fer. Would no more endure

This wooden slavery, than to suffer
The flesh-fly blow my mouth.'

In the first folio it is wodden., in the second it becomes
woodden.

Query : —

This sudden slavery.

Scene II.

' Trin. Why thou debosh'd fish, thou.' ; L IilL^^-^:

The Cambridge editors, contrary to their usual adher-
ence to the original text, undertake here to improve on

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST!

233

the drunken talk of Trinculo, by the change of debosJCd
to debauched — a questionable improvement.

-■:V ;■,•:";;■, \ ; Scene III.

' Gon. By'r lakin, I can go no further, sir ;
My old bones ache: here's a maze trod, indeed,
Through forth-rights and meanders I'

The only other example of the use of forth-right occurs
in ' Troilus and Cressida,' Act iii. Sc. 3, where Ulysses
says to Achilles : —

'If you give way, r

Or hedge aside from the direct forth right.'

Here 'the direct forth right' means undoubtedly the
straight course, and so it is supposed to stand in the
same sense, in Gonzalo's use of it, in apposition to
• meanders.' But treading a maze through direct courses
does not seem the most likely expression. In the first
folio it is fourth rights. According to the Cambridge
editors it becomes forth-rights in the second, third and
fourth folios. So far, at least, as my copy of the second
folio is concerned, it is forth rights without the hyphen.
Bearing in view the previous experiences, to which
Gonzalo refers, I venture to suggest

Through sore frights and meanders.

'Ariel. You three

From Milan did supplant good Prospero;
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requit it,
Him and his innocent child.'

Query :-

which hath requited.

234

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.'

ACT IV. Scene I.

' Pros. Now come, my Ariel ! bring n corollary
Rather than want a spirit ; appear and pertly ! '

What is a corollary here ? Knight explains it as * a
surplus number.' In the folio it is printed with a capital,
as though it were the name of some spirit. But capitals
arc employed too freely by the early printers to make
this of much moment. The word is used nowhere else
by Shakespeare, is unmusical where it stands, and is
probably a misprint. The concluding word of the next
line, pertly, seems also inapt. Ariel has just before
asked if the masque is expected presently. This I
imagine to be the word repeated, abbreviated probably in
the original manuscript, at the end of a long line. As
to the other conjectural change suggested here : it will
be remembered that Prospero's command to Ariel is

' Go bring the rabble,
O'er whom I give thee power, here to this place;
Incite them to quick motion.'

'v^uery:—

Now come, my Ariel f bring a whole array
Rather than want a spirit ; appear, and presently.'

'Ceres [Song']. Vines with clustering bunches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing;
Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of hai-vest.'

Spring can scarcely be the word here. Collier's folio

notes substitute rain. But an apt change is suggested

if we consider the nature of the invitation to which Ceres

is responding : Juno says : —

' Go with me
To bless this twain, that they may prosperous be,
And honour'd in their issue.'

Query: — .__„_. ^

Offspring come to you at farthest. '

• I

NOTES ON 'THE. TEMPEST.'

^35

*Ftr. Let me live here ever;

So rare a wondcr'd father and a wile
Makes this place paradise.'

The Cambridge editors seem to imply that the word
rendered wife here, is one of those in which different
copies of the first folio vary, some giving it as wifc^ and
some as tvisc ; and they accordingly adopt the former,
with the punctuation as given above. Judging from the
photozinrographic facsimile of the first folio, to which
alone I have access, it reads ivise. But owing to the use
of the long j, the difference between the two letters is
exceedingly slight ; and where the printing is not per-
fectly clear, it is just one of the rare cases where the
facsimile might mislead. In the second folio it is un-
questionably w?j^,and is punctuated accordingly, thus : —

So rare a wondcr'd father, and a wise,
Makes this place paradise.

This, I cannot doubt, is the true reading. Pope, who
adopts ivifc, changes makes to make, to agree with
the two nominatives. But it is common enough with
Shakespeare to make the verb agree with the nearest
nominative. Collier parades his folio annotator as
giving what he assumes to be ' the final decision in favour
of zvife^ Prospero has just replied to a question of
Ferdinand, that the majestic vision th< y have witnessed
is the work of spirits, called forth by his art to enact his
present fancies ; and he naturally responds : ' Let me
ever live in a place which so wonderful and wise a father
converts into a paradise.'

* Ariel. At last I left them

r the filthy- mantled pool beyond your cell,
, ..^_, ^^ There dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake
O'erstunk their feet.'

Feet cannot be the word here, when they were up to their

336

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST!

chins. Spedding suggests fear. Should it not be fell ?
Macbeth speaks of the time when his ' fell of hair
would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir, as life were in't;'
and Corin, in 'As You Like It,' speaking to Touchstone
of the ewes, says ' their fells you know are greasy/

• Cal. The dropsy drown this fool I '

In the folio it is dropsie. Query deep sea.

* Pros. Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions ; shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps.'

Query-

tvry convulsions

agued cramps.

^ ACT V. Scene I.

'Pros. My charms crack not; my spirits obey.'

Query: — dreak not. He says shortly after, ' My charms
I '11 break.'

' Ariel. The king,

His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted,
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay.'

So it is in the Cambridge and in other editions. But in
the folios it is drim fully which makes better rhythm,
and no worse meaning.

'Pros. A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains.
Now useless, boil'd within thy skull I'

The folios have doile and Ifoil. BoWd is the suggestion
of Pope.

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST.'

Query ' notv useless coil,' as in Act i. Sc. 2,

' My brave spirit
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil
Would not affect their reason.'

' Pros. O good Gonzaio, " * ' ''

My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him thou follow 'st.'

Collier's MS. substitutes servant for sir. Query suitor.
It is not his loyalty or service to the usurper that Pros-
pero commends; but he may refer, in calling him a loyal
suitor, to the fidelity with which he sued to Antonio, the
usurping duke, on Prospero's behalf. >

* Pros. Their understanding

Begins to swell ; and the approaching tide * ^^

Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy. Not one of them
That yet looks on me, or would know me.'

The first and second folios both read : ' That now ly
foule.' Assuming that some change is necessary, I
should prefer adhering to this, and reading : ' The rea-
sonable shores that now lie foul.' The repetition of
That at the beginning of two successive lines suggests
the possibility of a compositor's misreading here, as in
similar instances. Query, ' E'en yet looks on me.'

'Alan. You the like loss!

Pros. As great to me as late; and supportable
To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker
Than you may call to comfort you.'

Query reparable. Prospero is replying to Alonzo's
exclamation 'Irreparable is the loss.' Supportable is
unmusical and mars the rhythm.

238

NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST'

' Pros. Mark but the badges of these men, my lords, .

Then say if they be true

These three have robb'd me ; pnd this demi-devil —
For he's a bastard one — hath plotted with them
To take my life.'

My 1632 folio bears on its margin the substitution of
visages for badges. But the badges which shewed they
were not true, were,, I presume, the stolen apparel in
which Stephano and Trinculo are decked. But as
Caliban would ' have none on't,' it should read ' these
two have robb'd me.'

' Alon. Where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded 'em ? *

Shakespeare repeatedly uses the word gilded, but no-
where elsf; in this sense. Query ^gulled.

The epilogue which is appended to ' The Tempest'
seems an impotent afterpiece to this beautiful comedy.
It embodies in lame verse a feeble re-echo of the pre-
vious sentiments, without a single novel or apt idea. It
resembles in no respect Shakespeare's own epilogues,
and may be unhesitatingly assigned to some nameless
playwright of the seventeenth century.

CHAPTER XIV.

A MIDSUMMER NIG^ i ,- )KEAM.

'Bottom. T have had a most rare visk I have had a dream, — past
the wit of man to say what dream it was: mzc is biit an ass if he go

about to expound this drcarn. Methought 1 was there is no man can

tell what.' — A Midsutnmer Night's DreatK

THE text of ' A Midsummer Night's Dream' rests on
different authority from that of ' The Tempest,'
which appeared for the first time in the 1633 folio, seven
years after its author's death. A quarto edition of * A
Midsummer Night's Dream' was printed for Thomas
Fisher, and ' soulde at his shoppe, at the Signe of the
White Hart, in Fieetestreete/ in the year 1600. It bears
the name of William Shakespeare on the title ; was duly
entered at Stationers' Hall ; and, though characterised
by the usual carelessness of the press at that date, was,
we may presume, set up from the author's manuscript.
This was followed during the same year by another, and
probably surreptitious reprint, by James Roberts, in which
the printer's errors of the first quarto are corrected, and
the stage directions somewhat augmented, but with a due
crop of misreadings of its own. The Cambridge editors
surmise that it was a pirated reprint of Fisher's quarto,
for the use of the players. As such it got into the hands
of those two special players who issued the first folio as
'Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and
I'ragedies. Published accoiding to the True Originall
Copies ; ' and who, in the preface, pi y their readers that
they ' doe not envj'^ his friends the ofiice of their care

240

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

and paine to have collected and published them.' They
accordingly gave proof of their painstaking, so far as
this comedy is concerned, by following the surreptitious
copy. The first quarto thus appears to be the better au-
thority for the text of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream;'
and the folios have little more value than what is due
to contemporary conjectural emendation. This is fully
illustrated in the variations of the quarto and folio texts
in a passage immediately to be noticed, from the first
scene.

It is perhaps due to the early place which * A Mid-
summer Night's Dream' undoubtedly occupies among
the dramatic works of Shakespeare, that in all the older
texts it is divided into acts, but not into scenes. The
stage directions also are meagre, and have been re-
peatedly confused with the text ; and no list of dramatis
persotics is given. Hence those points have remained to
be supplied at the discretion of successive editors ; and
considerable diversity prevails. The same scene, for
example, which Capell and other editors make the
second scene in Act ii. becomes the third of Steevens
and Knight, and the fifth of Pope.

In many wqys it is apparent that this play is the work
of a different period from that in which its author wrote
'The Tempest ;' and it has even been supposed to embody
recollections of the author's own boyish years. Young
Shakespeare was in his twelfth year when the Earl of
Dudley entertained Queen Elizabeth with the famous
allegorical pageants produced at Kenilworth in honour
of her visit. The preparations for this magnificent recep-
tion of royalty enlisted the services of the inhabitants of
the surrounding country ; and it is not to be doubted that
those of Stratford, only a few miles distant, bore their
full share alike in the labours and the pastimes of this

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

241

grand local event. Among the characteristic allegorical
devices introduced on the occasion, Triton, in likeness of
a mermaid, paid obeisance to her Majesty ; and Arion,
seated on a dolphin's back, enchanted her with a song,
* aptly credited to the matter.' It is a pleasant fancy to
believe that the gifted boy actually witnessed this ; and
recalling the delights of his youthful fancy at the en-
chanting scene, he reproduced it in the well-known piece
of delicate flattery introduced into his ' Dream,' as a
more lasting tribute to the Maiden Queen : —

' Oberon. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememb'rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back.
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath.
That the rude sea grew civil at her song ;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music.

Puck. I remember.

Oberon. That very time I saw, but thou couldst not.
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all arm'd ; a certain aim he took
At a fair ve§tal throned by the west ;
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
' . As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts :

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon ;
And the imperial votaress passed on.
In maiden meditation, fancy- free.'

Malone, judging from internal evidence, ♦'egards this
delicately fanciful drama as revealing all ' the warmth
of a youthful and lively imagination ;' and therefore he
concludes it to be one of his earliest attempts at comedy.
But there is nothing crude or immature in it. On the
contrary, much of its poetry is of the rarest beauty : yet
dallying with the innocence of love, and fancifully inter-
blending its mishaps with ' such sights as youthful poets
dream.' Its light and airy, yet exquisitely charming
verse, has received the highest meed of appreciation ; for

242

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

it has passed beyond the region of dramatic dialogue
into that current popular poetry which is familiar as
household words ; and is scarcely assigned to individual
authorship, but rather constitutes a part of the living
language, an universal property wherever the English
tongue is spoken. The wonderful exuberance of fancy
which characterises this comedy has already attracted
our notice ; but many portions of the dialogue are in
rhyme, and much both of the prose and verse is pur-
posely wrought into a gay medley, which scarcely admits
of the same strict critical analysis as 'The Tempest.'
Indeed not a little of the charm of the prose dialogue
lies in the unconscious blunderings of the Athenian
mechanics. It has been subjected, nevertheless, to the
same critical revision as others of the plays. Rowe,
Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, and later
commentators, down to Collier, with his antique MS.
notes, have all tried their hands at the work of restoration.
Some of their emendations are welcome elucidations of
obscure or blundered passages. Others, especially those
on the lighter dialogue of the 'hempen homespuns
swaggering here,' are of a piece with the sage comments
of the censorious Bottom himself on ' the tedious brief
scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe : very
tragical mirth.' Little more is attempted here than the
production of a few notes and comments on obscure
passages, the fruits of careful and reverent study of
the play.

ACT I. Scene I.

' Dem. Relent, sweet Hermia ; and, Lysander, yield
Thy crazed title to my certain right.'

Query razed title. The decision of Theseus has just

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM,

«43

ii:X

been given, by which all claim or title of Lysander to
Hermia's hand is erased. The word razed repeatedly
occurs in this sense in the dramas.

* Lys. And she, sweet lady, dotes,

Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry.
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.'

Spotted is a Shakespearean word, the opposite of spot-
less : as Richard II. speaks of the spotted souls of his
disloyal nobles. No one therefore would venture to
disturb the text. But I may note here the conjectural
change pencilled by me on the margin as harmonising,
by antithesis, with Helena's 'devout idolatry' to her for-
sworn lover.

'Pon this apostate and inconstant man.

The following example of variations in the quarto and
folio texts will illustrate how little authority can be
attached to the latter as fulfilling the promise of the
editors that where the readers of Shakespeare had before
been ' abus'd with divers stolne and surreptitious copies,
maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of
injurious impostors, even those are now ofifer'd to their
view cured and perfect of their limbes.' The passage is
here given according to the text of the 1633 folio, in
which some attempts are made to remove the careless
blunders of the first folio : —

' Lysander. How now my love ? Why is your cheek so pale ?
How chance the Roses there do fade so fast?
Ilermia. Belike for want of raine, which I could well

Beteeme them, from the tempest of mine eyes.
Lysander. Hermia for ought that ever I could reade,

. „ Could ever heare by tale or history.

The course of true love never did run smooth,

But either it was diflerent in blood. —

~ Hermia. O crosse! too high to be enthral'd to love.

R a

■n,

344

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Lysander. Or else niisgraffed, in respect of yeares.

Hertnia. O spightl too old to be ingag'd to yong.

Lysander. Or else it stood upon the choise of merit.

Hermia. O hell! to choose love by anothers eye.'

The only other example of the use of the word beteem

by Shakespeare, is where Hamlet, speaking of his

father's loving care for his mother, says : ' He might not

beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly.'

It can scarcely admit of any common meaning applicable

in the two cases. But it is used by Spenser as equivalent

to bestoiv, in which sense it suits the text, and as it has

the authority both of the quartos and folios, must stand.

I had noted bestrcani as a conjectural reading. Bestow

would accord with another passage, where Henry V. in

his prayer before the battle of Agincourt, says of the

dead Richard's body —

' And on it have bestowed more contrite tears
Than from it issued forced drops of blood.'

The quartos have ' Eigh me, for ought that I could
ever read.' The first folio, omitting the ' Eigh me,'
simply has : ' For ought that euer I could reade,' and
the second folio replaces the ejaculation of the quartos
with the name, nearly equivalent in sound, of Hei'inia.

The change of love (in the first folio lotie) into low —

'O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low' —

is due to Theobald, and commends itself to nearly every
reader as a restoration of Shakespeare's own word.

' Or else it stood upon the choice of friends '

is the text of the quartos ; yet it is changed, undoubtedly
for the worse, to merit., as shewn in the above version of
the folio text. This example of variation between the
quartos and folios serves to shew how little authority can
be attached to the latter ; and at the same time illustrates

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

845

the impossibility in some cases "of amending undoubted
errors by conjectural changes based on any probable
misprint. Hermia's response perfectly accords with the
original reading of the quartos, while it has little or no
meaning in reply to ' the choice of merit,' which is never-
theless retained in the first and subsequent folios. Here
there can scarcely be a doubt that the latter is an un-
designed change for the worse. But nothing in the con-
text helps to any conjecture as to the origin of the
blunder, while its retention in the second and later folios
indicates that the original quarto text was, so far at
least, neglected in the corrections of the press. Collier's
MS. annotator makes the feeble emendation of men for
merit. It is a good illustration of the guesswork restora-
tions based on supposed typographical errors ; and is an
instance where, if the word friends had not the authority
of the quartos to sustain it, the feebler word might have
found favour, owing to its seeming resemblance to the
objectionable merit. Mr. Collier, who does not seem to
have been aware of the earlier authority for the received
reading, says ^friends has ordinarily been substituted
for merit \ but men^ inserted in the margin by the
corrector of the folio, is likely to have been the real
word, misheard by the copyist.'

'/ff/. Sicknesse is catching: O were favour so,
Your words Ida catch, faire Hermia ere I go,
My eare should catch your voice, my eye, your eye.
My tongue should catch your tongues sweet melodic.'

So the text stands in the second folio ; and as it
makes good sense, it might be allowed to remain. But
alike in the quartos and first folio it reads, ' Your words
I catch,' and Hanmer made on this the apt emendation,
' Yours would I catch,' which more fully accords with
the whole context.

246

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT II. Scene I.

'Fairy. And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.'

Knight, as his fashion is, explains the word orbs here
by devising a meaning suited to the context, and fitting
it to the word. He accordingly says : ' Orbs, the fairy
ringSf as they are popularly called. It was the fairy's
office to dew these orbs, which had been parched under
the fairy feet in the moonlight revels.' The word is re-
peatedly used by Shakespeare, but never in any such
sense ; and what follows in the fairy's speech implies
that it is the flowers that, in some way, he speaks of.
The cowslips are her special favourites, * her pensioners' ;
and so he says —

'I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.' '

This is fitter work than dewing orbs, or parched fairy-
rings. Grey suggests herbs.

Query-

To dew her cups upon the green.

'Puck. And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But they do square, that all their elves, for fear.
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.'

Unless doubtfully in a passage in ' Titus Andronicus,'
the word sqitare is not used in such a sense as would
suit the text, especially in reference to the fairy king
and queen. Peck suggests y'^;', or spat re.

Query quarrel.

' Tit. And never since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead.'

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

247

Knight explains 'the middle summer's spring' as the
beginning of midsummer ; but it seems a cumbrous
tautology in this sense. Looking to the context, which
describes, as the fruit of Oberon and Titania's brawls,
contagious fogs, the green corn rotting in the drowned
field, and 'the nine men's morris' filled up with mud,
I had noted as a conjectural reading ' this muddy sum-
mer's spring.' But a slighter change would be ' the
middle summer's prime!

' Tit. The human mortals want their winter here ;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.'

Various conjectures have been ofifered in amendment
of the somewhat pointless ' winter here! Johnson changes
it to wofited year ; Warburton to winter's heryed. Theo-
bald had already proposed the better amendment of
wifiter chear, or cheer, which suits very well the context ;
and closely accords with the old spelling of the folios,
hecre. Looking to the previous statements, that ' The
ox hath stretch'd his yoke in vain,' 'The ploughman
lost his sweat,' ' The green corn hath rotted,' and ' The
folds stand empty in the drowned field,' I am led to
suggest their winter hire.

' Dem. Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more.
Ilel. You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant;
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart
Is true as steel; leave you your power to draw,
And I shall have no power to follow you.'

This passage has not hitherto been challenged ; but
the meaning of ' you draw not iron, for my heart is true
as steel ' is obscure. If it were rendered. ' But yet you
draw not iron, though my heart is true as steel,' the
idea might be that she had no heart of iron, hard as

248

A Af/DSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

til

his was. But I suspect the iron to be a printer's bkuidcr,
suggested by the steel following. In the folios Iron is
printed with a capital, which, in the second folio is some-
what displaced, and separated from the ron. This has
apparently suggested to the former possessor of my copy
an ingenious emendation, which he has written on the
margin thus : You draWy not I run, for., &c. Among my
own annotations are included this conjectural reading : —

' But yet you draw no truer ; fcir my lieart
Is true as steel.'

^ni)> I

J Si i

Scene II.

* Tit. Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence:
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds :
Some war with rere-mice lor their leathern wings,
To m.ike my small elves cents; and some keep back
The clamorous owl, that nigliily hoots a^d wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep ;
Then to your oflfices, and let me rest.'

The idea of the third part of a minute dedicated to
the fulfilment of the fairy queen's behests, by the com-
panions of Puck, who could ' put a girdle round the earth
in forty minutes,' admirably accords with the movements
of such airy beings, swift as thought. But Warburton so
utterly misses the meaning, that he converts sucl. fairy
pastimes into a toil for the third part of tJie midnight.

'Her. Lie further off: in human modesty,
Such separation as may well be said
Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid.'

Titania's use of the phrase 'human mortals' is very
expressive, but 'human modesty' seems a needless
pleonasm. The word stands humane in the quartos, and
in three out of the ^our folios. Nicliolas Rowe, the
earliest reviser of Shakespeare's text, made the fourth

/I AirnSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM.

349

folio the basis of all his restorations, and no doubt
adopted this without being aware of a ly variation. The
elder forn of humane would be preferable, though it can
scarcely be claimed as a purposed change, for this is
the usual mode of spelling hmnan in Shakespeare's day.
If any change is to be made, comihon modesty would
better suit the context.

ACT til. Scene II.

• Oht. This falls out better than I could devise ;
But hast thuu yet latch't the Athenian's eyes
With the love-juice, as I did hid thee do?*

The word is variously latcht, lacht, in the quartos and
folios. Hanmer makes it lech'd^ another commentator
laced: while Knight, seeking as usual a meaning in the
context, explains it licked o'er. But is thei' any such
word J* Puck is elsewhere commanded to ' anoint his
eyes ; ' or he is to * crush this herb into Lysander's eye.'
Oberon speaks of the juice as 'on sleeping eye-lids laid,*
and himself undertakes to * streak ' Titania's eyes with the
same potent fluid. But no such word as latch't is used
elsewhere in any similar sense. Oberon's term, streak'd,
would here also suit th^ rhythm. But latch't may pos-
sibly be a misprint for bath'd.

*Her. I'll believe as soon

This whole earth may be bor'd; and that the moon
May through the centre creep, and so displease
Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes.'

Hanmer suggests disease in lieu of displease. The idea
in relation to which Hermia introduces this quaint
analogy is the substitution of Demetrius for her favoured
lover Lysander, of whom she says. ' The sun was not so

350

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

true unto the day as he to me;' and therefore she will as
soon believe that at this very time of night, while the
moon is Iiere, the sun may be supplanted by it, on the
other side of the world.

Query :—

' That the moon
May through the centre creep, and so displace
Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes.'

' Hel. Can you not hate me, as I know you do,
But you must join in souls to mock me too?'

' Join in souls ' has been recognised as, in some way or
other, wrong. Hanmcr substitutes flouts for soiils^ and
probably some such word is the true reading. Warbur-
ton renders it must join insolcnts ; T y rwhltt, must Join
ill souls ; and Mason, with the slightest change on the
text. You must join in soul.

Query :—joi)i in sports. She accuses them of being all
set against her for their merriment; 'all to make you
sport;' and when Hermia enters, she charges her as
one of this confederacy, joined ' all three to fashion this
false sport.'

'Her. Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes ;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense.
It pays the hearing double recompense.'

The his in the first line is undoubtedly the old Anglo-
Saxon neuter genitive, and is as Shakespeare wrote it.
Where, however, in this and many other lines, there is
obviously no rhetorical gender, and the nominative it
follows close at hand, it would be no greater liberty
with the text to substitute the modern form its, than
many orthographical changes universally approved of.
Another passage in this comedy will serve to illustrate

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

the old use of his. Titania is detailing to Oberon the

fruits of their brawls : —

* The ox hath therefore stretch'd iis yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost hh sweat ; and the green corn
Hath rotted, ere i»s youth attained a beard.'

The new form was adopted in a single generation.
Milton evades the obscurity in rhetorical impersona-
tion consequent on Ids being in use as a neuter form, by-
falling back, whenever he can do so, on the gender of
the Latin derivative ; e. g. * Paradise Lost,' Bk. I, Lat.
forma : —

' His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness.'

But by the time that Dryden succeeded him as the
poet of a new era — though he was in his forty-fourth
year at Milton's death, — the change had been so univer-
sally adopted, that in challenging the grammatical
English of Ben Jonson he quotes this line from his
'Catiline'

'Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,'

and says of it ' Heaven is ill syntax with his'

This proof of how thoroughly a grammatical usage
of Shakespeare's age had passed out of knowledge in a
single generation, shews that Dryden's emendations on
the text of ' The Tempest ' rest on little better authority
than the guesses of modern commentators. He would
have converted the his into its, not as a change rendered
desirable by altered grammatical forms, but as the
correction of a positive blunder. But many passages
occur where the retention of the old neuter form is apt
to mislead ; and as Shakespeare does occasionally em-
ploy the new form, its substitution in other cases is
allowable. Take, for example, the following lines from
Oberon's directions to Puck : —

252

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

' Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye ;
Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might,
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight.'

'With its might' would be a legitimate emendation.
The rirst /ns undoubtedly refers to the liquor, the second
to Lysander; yet as the text stands, it suggests the
idea that, along with Lysander's * error,' the liquor was to
take away his might.

' Hel. We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion.'

Pope needlessly takes in hand to amend the harmony
of the second line, which is thoroughly Shakespearean.
He reads 'Created vv-th our needles both one flower.'
Steevens, with the same object in view, abbreviates needles
to iieelds. But no commentator notices the extravagant
simile, 'like two artificial gods.' I had noted on my
own annotated copy the conjecture, like to artijieer gods.
But gods seems altogethci' alien to the general current
of Helena's thoughts. Query, tivo artificial buds.

' Hel. So we grew together.

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet a union in partition ;
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem;
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry.
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.'

To any one acquainted with heraldry, the phrase ' two
of the first' seems such unmistakeable heraldic language,
that he is apt to fancy he understands the whole allu-
sion. But reduced to a defined solution, it does not
appear by any means so clear. Monk Mason says ' two
of the first means two coats of the first house, which are

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

253

properly due but to one;' and Knight says, 'there is
a double comparison here — first, of the two bodies com-
pared to two coats of heraldry ; and secondly, of the
one heart compared to the one crest, and the one
owner.' But this can only end in the impaling of two
similar coats of arms, and leaves the ' due but to one,'
on which the whole force of the simile rests, unaccounted
for. Douce and Grant White reject the heraldic signifi-
cance of ' first' and hold it to be used in its ordinary
sense, referring to two bodies. Of the general meaning
there can be no doubt. Helena tells Hermia that, with
their ' sisters' vows ' and closest friendship, they had been
as if with two bodies, yet but one heart. As, however,
the heraldic interpretations seem to fail according to the
received version, it may be worth while reconsidering
the original text. The first folio reads, 'Two of the
first life coats in heraldry.' The only change in the
second folio is the insertion of a comma after life.
Theobald chained the life to like. It seems to me that
the text as it stands in the second folio, makes at least
as good sense as the other, and no worse heraldry. Two
bodies of the first life, would be moulded on one parental
stem, and two coats in heraldry of the first life, would
be due to one and the same descendant.

' So with two seeming bodies, but one hea"t,
Two of tiie first life : coats in heraldry
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.'

' Her. I understand not what you mean by this.
Hel. Ay, do, persever, counterfeit sad looks.
Make mouths upon me when I turn my back.'

The first quarto, according to the Cambridge editors,
reads, / doe. Persever. The second quarto and the
folios are stated, on the same authority, to read /, do^

254

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

persever. The first folio, in so far as the ohotozinco-
graphic facsimile may be appealed to, reads —

'I, doe, perseuer, counterfeit sad lookeb,
Make mouthes vpon me when I turne my backe.'

In the second folio it becomes, /, do, persever, &c. The
capital /, however, is the usual way of rendering the ay
of our later orthography, and is not, therefore, any sure
guide to the true reading. Rowe rendered it. Ay, do,
persevere ; but modern critical editors have restored the
persever, as essential to the rhythm. It seems to me
more effective, as Helena's answer to Hermia, and not
without some justification from the original text, to
read —

' I do ; — perceive you counterfeit sad looks.'

She has already exclaimed shortly before, ' Now I per-
ceive they have conjoin'd, all three ;' and when he says,
' I understand not what you mean,' she replies, ' But I
do ; I perceive you counterfeit sad looks, make mouths
upon me,' &c.

' Her. Lysander, whereto tends all this ?

Lys. Away, you Ethiope !

Bern. No, no; he'll

Seem to break loose ; take on as you would follow.
Hut yet come not : you are a tame man, go 1 '

This passage has given the commentators no little
trouble. In the first quarto it is No, no ; Jieele Seemc to
breake loose. The second, finding something wrong,
renders it as one line — No, no, heel seeme to breake loose.
The folio editors, or press reader, try another change,
and it there reads, still as one line — No, no. Sir, seeme to
breake loose. Pope rearranges the verse, and reads. No,
no hell seem To break aivay ; Capell makes it. No, no ;
he'll not come. Seem to break loose ; Malone, No, no ;

las.-

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

2? 3

he'll — sir, Seem to break loose; Steevens, A^^, no; sir: — he
will, Seem to break loose ; while Jackson furnishes an
amusing example of the misspent ingenuity which so
often makes the error of one editor or commentator the
basis of another's conjectures. Taking the sir of the
folios as his guide, he renders it, No, no, he'll not stir ;
Seem to break loose. The Cambridge editors, distracted
with the multitude of counsellors, after exhausting a
long foot-note, take up the question anew in the appen-
dix, where they say, ' In this obscure passage we have
thought it best to retain substantially the reading of the
quartos. The folios, though they alter it, do not re-
move the difficulty, and we must conclude that some
words, perhaps a whole line, have fallen out of the text.'
They accordingly indicate the supposed hiatus thus : —

No, no; he'll . . .
Seem to break loose ; &c.

It seems presumptuous to follow such varied and high
authorities with a new suggestion ; and still more, to
fancy, as I am tempted to do, that a very trifling altera-
tion clears up the whole difficulty, without any missing
line. A pair of distracted lovers, set at cross purposes
by Puck's knavish blundering, are giving vent to the
most extravagant violence of language. Helena says, a
very little before —

' O spite ! O hell ! I see you all are bent
To set against me for your merriment.'

In like fashion, as it appears to me, Demetrius now
exclaims, in language perfectly consistent with the rude
epithets Lysander is heaping on Hermia —

' No, no ; hell
Seems to break loose; take on as you would, fellow!
But yet come not; you are a tame man, go!'

«Ji

'■"■"-- Si I

■A.

2;6

yl MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Lysander's reply, though addressed seemingly to Hermia,
is amply consistent with such violent hyperbole : —

' Hang off, thou cat, thou burr ! vile thing, let loose,
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent.'

ACT IV. Scene I.

'06«. And gentle Puck take this transformed scalp
From off the head of this Athenian swain ;
That he awaking when the others do,
May all to Athens back again repair.'

All may to Athens is suggested by the context, but it is
more musical as it stands. Query transformifig scalp.

It cannot but seem presumptuous to venture on any
emendation of Nick Bottom's exquisite soliloquy, which
he places far beyond reach of all carping critics by his
solemn decision that ' man is but an ass if he go about
to expound this dream.' Yet one little particle does
seem to admit of change. His resolution is, ' I will get
Peter Quince to write a ballad,' or, as the folios have it,
a ba|le^ 'pf tjlis drearn. It shall be called Bottom's
bream, aecause it Hath no bottom, and I will sing it in
:|je jat er end of a play, before the duke. Peradventure, to
tl^W t llie \\\ott ^laclous, I shall sing it at her death.'
At her death is doubtless at the death of Thisbe, when
jie, being already the dead Pyramus would all the more
characteristically turn up again with his own ballad,
lusliad of the Ilcigomask dance which he does actually
volunteer. Whether it be safe to venture on the change
of a single letter in his inimitable confusions of all the
senses may well be questioned ; but doubtless he means
' in the latter en ; >%" play ' of Pyramus and Thisbe,

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

with a view to add one more climax to its ' very tragical
mirth': and not at the close of some possible future
appearance before the duke.

ACT V. Scene I.

The comedy closes with a fairy dance and song,
which the Cambridge editors, following the quartos,
assign to Oberon. But this is obviously an error,
though parts of it may be properly enough assigned
to him to sing in solo. Johnson preceded them in re-
storing the song to Oberon. But having by this means
converted it into a part of the dialogue, he proceeds
naively to enquire after the song which Titania calls
for, and comes to the conclusion that ' it is gone after
many other things of greater value. The truth is that
two songs are lost,' one called for by Oberon and the
other by Titania, because, as Johnson supposes, ' they
were not inserted in the players' parts, from which the
drama was printed.' All this is a mistake, founded
on the revival of the original error of assigning the song
to Oberon. On the contrary, his orders are given to
* every elf and fairy sprite ' to perform various favouring
sei-vices within the hallowed house of Duke Theseus and
his bride, and then he adds : —

' And this ditty after me
Sing and dance it trippingly.'

Titania thereupon joins in with her commands to their
fairy train : —

' First rehearse your song by rote,
To each word a wp.rbling note ;
Hand in hand with fairy grace,
Will we sing and bless this place.'

In the folios the .song immediately follows this, printed

268

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

as such in italics, and headed The Song. It was no
doubt at the date of the first folio, if not at that of
the quartos, set to music, with its various parts appor-
tioned to different fairy singers. Obcron and Titania
doubtless had a prominent share assigned to them ;
and the fairy chorus taking up alternate lines, repeating,
and singing in parts, the verse would be arranged, in
accordance with the exigencies of the music, and in all
probability transcribed therefrom with no very critical
attention to the order of the lines. In the folios the
closing lines stand thus : —

* With this field dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gate,
And each severall chamber blesse.
Through this pallace with sweet peace,
Ever shall in safety rest,
And the owner of it blest.
Trip away, make no stay ;
Meet me all by breake of day.'

It has been seen from the first that some change is
needed here. Mr. R. Grant White says : ' " Ever shall
in safety rest" is neither sense nor English, ancient or
modern.' Rowe renders the line Ever shall it safely
rest ; Malone, E^er shall it in safety rest ; Warburton,
Ever shall it safely rest. Staunton appears to have
first detected the true source of error, and suggested
the transposition of the fifth and sixth lines, after at-
tempting amendment in another way, by changing
Ever shall into Every hall. Without being aware of
his proposed transposition, I had already noted on
the margin : ' These lines to be sung by different
fairies'; and assuming them thus to be taken up by
different singers, whereby the logical sequence might
be disarranged, I had markeil a more comprehensive
re-arrangement. At the point wjii'if these lines begin

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

2r9

e
n

there is a change of theme. Oberon and Titania may
be assumed to take the lead, up to this point, with their
special blessings on the bridal bed and the promised
issue. The earlier portion correctly arranges itself in
couplets, and may be supposed to be sung as a duet by
Oberon and Titania. Th scene lies in the palace of
Theseus. ' The iron tongue of midnight hath t < )ld twelve ;'
and the irrepressible Bottom, whose death-stab

'In that left pap,
Where heart doth hop,'

was supposed to have made an end of him in a previous
scene, has in vain come alive again witi\ his proftcrccl
epilogue. ' No epilogue, I pr.i> you,' exclaims the Duke,
'for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for
when the players are all dead, there need none be
blamed :' and so his commands are —

'Lovers to l)cd; 'lis ahnost fair\--time,
I fear we shall oufsieej) the coming mom '

Puck accordingly appears forthwith, broom in hand, to
prepare 'the hallow'd house' for its supernatural visitant.*);

' The fairies that do run,

By the triple Hecate's team,
From the presence of the sun,
Following darkness like a dream.'

Oberon despatches ' every elf and fairy sprite' to illumine
the palace with their glimmering light. Titania invites
them first to a rehearsal of their .song of blessing ; and
then, the whole fairy band being commissioned to wander
through the house and fulfil their errand there till break
of day, Oberon says :

•To the best bride-bed will we,
Which by us shall blessed be;'

and so he proceeds with a succession of fairy bene-
dictions in rhyming couplets. But now, at the close,

S 2

260

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

the fairy train are anew commissioned to go through
the palace of Theseus and bless every chamber, conse-
crating it with their elfin field-dew. Arranged in the
following order, the consecutive relation of ideas seems
to be more clearly expressed : —

'Through this palace with sweet peace
Every fairy take his ^ait,
And each several chamber bless,
With this field-dew consecrate,
And the owners of it blest,
Ever shall in safety rest ;
Trip away ;
Make no stay ;
Meet me all by break of day.'

Oberon begins his part of this elfin consecration-
service thus : —

'Through the house give glimmering light
By the dead and drowsy fire,
Every elf and fairy sprite.

Hop as light as bird from brier.'

We have accordingly spoken above of Oberon despatch-
ing his train to illumine the palace thus. But the first
couplet seems to involve a confusion of ideas, which
early attracted the attention of the commentators.
Warburton makes the first line, Through this house;
Johnson further changes it to, Through this house in
glivimering light; while Mr. R. Grant White offers the
slight but apt change of Though^ for Through. My own
conjectural reading suggests a different change, also in-
volving no great literal variation : — Through the house-
wives' glimmering light. The couplet of Puck which
immediately precedes, sufficiently harmonises with such
an idea, where with broom he sweeps the dust behind
the door.

It .seems a piece of hypercriticism to subjejt the light

fifi

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

a6i

fairy songs and the epilogue of Puck, with its rhyming
couplets, to any severe verbal analysis. Where, however,
the language seems obscure, the efforts at amending the
text are sometimes rewarded by catching its meaning,
without the necessity for any change. The notoriously
careless way in which this comedy appears to have
been edited from the first justifies suspicion of blundering
whenever a difficulty occurs ; for none of all the plays of
Shakespeare surpass 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in
the simple be: ity of its charming verse. What, then, is
the meaning of this line — ^No more yielding hut a dreain}
Like other readings where the text has been corrupted,
it has a seeming significance in relation to the context
till the meaning is challenged. Not a little of the beau-
tiful fancy of the whole comedy turns on the way in which
the supernatural elements seem to hover indefinitely
between reality and a dream ; and so Puck says at parting,
with this slight conjectural emendation : —

'If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here.
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No mere idling, but a dream.
Gentles do not reprehend.'

So much for conjectural revision and emendation of
* A Midsummer Night's Dream.' In this, as in all other
of the great master's works, the beauties are so manifold
and so striking, that the few undoubted blemishes with
which the textual critic is free to deal, are but as motes
in the sunshine ; and Shakespeare can be enjoyed, with
little sense of imperfection, in the most corrupt text of
old quarto or folio.

The marvellous piece of fancy thus subjected to cold
critical supervision, is so wonderful an embodiment of

36a

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

sportive idealism ; such a happy blending of the utmost
extremes of incongruity : that it seems as much to set
analytical acumen at defiance as if it were an actual
dream. That Lysandcr and Demetrius, Hermia and
Helena, should so disport themselves, so woo, so rail,
scorn and anathematise each other, prove faithless,
proclaim loathing, and yet, after all, share in the fairy
blessings whereby

' Shall all the couples ihiee
Ever true in loving be,'

would seem inconceivable, had not Shakespeare wrought
the whole into such perfect consistency, that the imagina-
tion welcomes it as the realisation of its own rarest
fancy-flights, and claims for it a charmed circle within
which imagination shall hold its own, and reason dispense
with all censorious anatomisings. We yit J ourselves to
the charm, and then imagination sees no more inc )n-
gruity in the perverse wooings of the Athenian lovers,
than in the pranks of Puck, and the quaint devices of
Oberon for outwitting his wilful Queen of Shadows.
Shakespeare once believed it all himself, when by the
Stratford ingle-nook he listened as a boy to nursery
tales of elves and fairies, such as doubtless some of the
narrators were ready to swear they had themselves seen
when the moonlight glanced through the oak-branches,
and played with flitting light and shadow among the
cowslips and daisies of Charlecote Chace.

But there is one character least of all seemingly fitted to
consort with beings light as air: that most prosaic of
' rude mechanicals ' and ' human mortals,' Nick Bottom,
Yet what inimitable power and humorous depth of irony
are there in the Athenian weaver and prince of clownish
players ! Vain, conceited, consequential : he is neverthe-
less no mere empty lout, but rather the impersonation of

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

363

charactci ustics which have abounded in every age, and
find ample scope for their display in every social rank.
Bottom is the work of the same n .ister hantl which
wrought for us the Caliban and Miranda, the Puck and
Ariel, oi such diverse worlds. He is the very embodi-
ment and idealis.aion of that self-esteem which is a
human virtue by no means to be dispensed with, though
it needs some strong counterpoise in the well-bal.Miced
mind. In tli weak vain man, who fancies everybody is
thinking of him and looking at him, it takes the name of
shyness, and claim, nearest kin to modesty. With
robust insensiti vulgarity it assumes an air of uni-
versal philanthropy and good-fellowship. In the man of
genius it reveals itself in very var>'ing phases : gives
to Pope his waspish irritability as a satirist, and crops
out anew in the transparent mysteries of publication
of his laboured-impromptu private letters ; betrays
itself in the self-laudatory exclusivencss whitu carried
Wordsworth through long years of detraction and neglect
to his final triumph ; in the morbid introx ersions of
Byron, and his assumed defiance of 'the world's dread
laugh'; in the sturdy self-assertion of Burns, the honest
faith of the peasant bard, that

' The rank is but the guinea stamp,
Tlie man 's the gowd for a' that ! '

In Ben Jonson it gave character to the whole .nan.
Goldsmith and Chatterton, Hogg and Hugh Miller only
differed from their fellows in betraying the self-esteem
which more cunning adepts learn to disguise under
many a mask, even from themselves. It shines in
modest prefaces, writes autobiographies and diaries by
the score, and publishes poenij by the hundred —

' Obliged by hunger and request of friends.'

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^ MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Nick Bottom is thus a representative man, * not one,
but all mankind's epitome.' He is a natural genius. If
he claims the lead, it is not without a recognised fitness
to fulfil the dut'es he assumes. He is one whom nothing
can put out. ' I have a device to make all well,' is his
prompt reply to every difficulty, and the device, such as
it is, is immediately forthcoming. A duke is but a duke
after all ; and we may be well assured, when Theseus
tells the Queen of the Amazons of his wclcomers col-
lapsing in ' the modesty of fearful duty,' Nick Bottom
had no place in his thoughis : —

' Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences.
Throttle their practised accent in their fears,
And in conclusion, dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome.'

As to Bottom, were he the duke, and Theseus the
clown, he could not take it more coolly. He comes back
from the fairy brake, ready as ever for the minutest
details, and prompt for action. No time for talk now.
' The duke hath dined ; get your appaiel togeiher, good
strings to your beards,' — for a pretty thing it were, if
your aptly -chosen orange -tawny or French -crown-
coloured beard were to drop off in the very crisis of the
tragedy ! * In any case let Thisby have clean linen i' and
poor Snug, the extempore lion, beware of paring his nails.
' And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we
are to utter sweet breath, and I do not doubt but to have
them say it is a sweet comedy.' Bottom is as completely
conceived, in all perfectness of consistency, as any
character Shakespeare has drawn : ready-witted, un-
bounded in his self-confidence, and with a conceit nursed
into the absolute proportions which we witness by the

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

265

admiring deference of his brother clowns. Yet this is no
more than the recognition of true merit. Their admira-
tion of his parts is rendered ungrudgingly, as it is received
by him simply as his due. Peter Quince appears as
responsible manager of the theatricals, and indeed is
doubtless the author of 'the most lamentable comedy.'
For Nick Bottom, though equal to all else, makes no
pretensions to the poetic art. He is barely awakened
out of his fairy-trance, when he begins to cudgel his
brains. ' Methought I was — there is no man that can
tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had — but
man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what
methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the
ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to
taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what
my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of
this dream ; it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because
it hath no bottom ; and I will sing it in the latter end of
a play, before the duke.' Here there is no mistaking
the poet of the company. All due recognition of his
powers is conceded as a matter of course ; but the result
leads none the less to Bottom's own pre-eminence. The
ballad is to be ' Bottom's Dream,' and with it he is to
come in as the climax of the whole performance, before
the admiring duke.

Peter Quince is as it were proprici-or or lessee of the
improvised theatre, and assumes accordingly such
authority as ' the only begetter ' of their comedy must
needs do. He apportions to Bottom his part of
Pyramus, and persists in his cast of the play in spite of
the weaver's ambition to hide his face and play Thisbe ;
or shew his face and roar in the lion's part, till the duke
shall say, ' Let him roar again I let him roar again ! '
But it is a point manifestly conceded by all as beyond

tb6

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

dispute, that without Nick Bottom nothing can be done.
To the very colour of his beard he is ready for the
perfect discharge of the lover's part, much as he should
prefer to play the tyrant. He is prepared for any daring,
any sacrifice ; if needs be, can undertake Thisbe, and
speak her to the very life, ' in a monstrous little voice' ;
or, since his threatened roarings were enough ' to fright
the duchess and the ladies, and to hang us all,' he * will
aggravate his voice so, that he will roar you as gently
as any sucking dove ; he will roar you an 'twere any
nightingale.' As to his own specialty of Pyramus, ' a
lover that kills himself most gallantly for love,' — rather
than the ladies shall be put beside themselves with
fear at the sight of a drawn sword, or the grave tragical
suicide omitted, he is prepared to announce to the duke
and his noble auditors, 'for the more better assurance,
that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the
weaver.'

Quince is throughout the literary man. He is to
' draw a bill of properties such as our play wants ;' and
to him Bottom turns, as a matter of course, to 'write me
a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say ' what he
forthwith dictates. As to the weaver himself, he doubt-
less does not use to write his name, but has a mark to
himself, like an honest plain-deah'ng man. Nevertheless
poets must be content to be guided by their betters.
He will dictate the very measure of his prologue, in
spite of Peter Quince's vocation as laureat. He will
have none of your alternating eights and sixes ; nothing
will please him but that it be written in verses of
eight and eight. He anticipates every difficulty, and is
ever equal to the occasion. ' To bring in, God shield us 1
a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing ; for there
is not a more dreadful wild-fowl than your lion living,

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

267

and we ought to look to 't ;' and so he decides that Snug
must name his name, and shew half his face through the
lion's neck, and with all soothing entreaties to the ladies
not to fear, not to tremble, he is to tell them plainly
he is Snug the joiner. He looks into the almanac, and
finds moonshine for them just when wanted ; devises a
wall for Pyramus and Thisbe, and a cranny through which
they may whisper ; and when at last Puck sends him
back from his tiring-room in the thorn-brake, translated
with the ass's head, the scare of the whole company
leaves him wholly unaftecte 1. 'I will not stir from this
place do what they can ; I wiu walk up and down here
and I will sing, that they shall here I am not afraid.'

No wonder, when Bottom could nowhere be heard
of, all further hope of the performance was at an end.
There are those in every rank in life whose self-
reliance is a prop on which all lean. ' If he come
not,' says Flute, 'then the play is maired. It goes
not forward, doth it ? ' ' It is not possible,' is Quince's
reply. He doubtless had him in his eye when he
wrote the character. 'You have not a man in all
Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he.' There is
neither dubiety nor jealousy as to his pre-eminent
abilities. ' No,' says Flute, as spokesman for the whole,
' he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man
in Athens ; ' and indeed the only point of difference
between them is whether 'sweet bully Bottom' shall
indeed be pronounced, according to Peter Quince's
eulogium, ' a very paramour for a sweet voice ; ' or
whether, as Flute will have it, they should not rather
call him a paragon ; for ' a paramour is, God bless us,
a thing of naught ! ' Had their sport but gone on,
they were all made men. Sixpence a day had been
the undoubted award of such a genius. ' Sixpence a-

268

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

day during life ; he could not have 'scaped sixpence
a-day. An the Duke had not given him sixpence a-
day for playing Pyramus,' says the admiring Bellows-
mender, ' I'll be hanged! He would have deserved it.
Sixpence a-day m Pyramus, or nothing.' But now
all is ruined without him, when — ' O most courageous
day! O most happy hour!' — to the unbounded delight
of Quince and his whole company, the transmogrified
weaver turns up again, and all is well.

But fully to appreciate the ability and self-posses-
sion of Nick Bottom in the most unwonted circum-
stances, we must follow the translated mechanical to
Titania's bower, where the enamoured queen lavishes
her favours on her strange lover. His cool prosaic
commonplaces fit in with her rhythmical fancies as
naturally as the dull grey of the dawn meets and em-
braces the sunrise. His valiant song awakes Titania
from her flowery bed amid the fragrance of the wild
thyme and the nodding violets, while woodbine, sweet
musk-roses and the eglantine overcanopy her couch ;
and to her charmed eye the transformed weaver, with
his ass's nowl, appears an angel. 'What iiempen home-
spuns have we swaggering so near the cradle of the
fairy Queen?' is Puck's exclamation when he first gets
sight of Quince's company. Titania, on the contrary,
awakened by Bottom's carol, exclaims, 'What angel
wakes me from my flowery bed?' and so she forthwith
addresses hii.; : —

' I pray thee, gentle mortal, s'ng again ;
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note,
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me.
On the first view, to say, to swear, I Icve thee.'

* Methinks, mistress,' he replies, — in no way put out by

A MIDSUMMER NIGIIT'S DREAM.

269

such advances, — 'you should have little leason for that.
And yet, to say the tiuth, reason and love keep little
company together no\v-a-days. The more the pity
that some honest neighbours will not make them
friends.' He is at home at once with the whole fairy
court, and condescends to his airy attendants with an
easy gracious familiarity worthy of one to whom the
favours of Queen Titania come as though they we-e
his by right. ' I shall desire more of your acquaint-
ance, good Master Cobweb,' he says, with a play upon
his name. Turning to another of the fairy train,
' Your name, honest gentleman ? ' is his easy salutation.
With him, in like manner, he has his jest ; as apt as
that of the wise King James, when it pleased him to
pun in learned fashion with admiring courtiers at Holy-
rood or Whitehall. ' I pray you commend me to Mis-
tress Squash, your mother, and to Master Peascod
your father. Good Master Peaseblossom I shall desire
you of more acquaintance ; ' and presently the whole
delicate fairy band are engaged in scratching his ass's
muzzle. For, as he says to good Monsieur Mustard-
seed, 'I must to the baiber's, monsieur; for, methinks
I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I am
such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me I must
scratch.'

Here we cannot but note the quaint blending of the
ass with the rude Athenian 'thick-skin': as though the
creator of Caliban had his own theory of evolution ;
and has here an eye to the more jfitting progenitor of
man. Titania would know what her sweet love desires
to eat. ' Truly a peck of provender : I could munch
your good dry oats. Methinks I have a great desire te
a bottle of hay. Good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.'
The puzzled fairy queen would fain devise some fitter

270

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

dainty for her lover. ' I have a venturous fairy,' she
tells him, ' that shall seek the squirrel's hoard, and
fetch thee new nuts.' But no ' Bottom has not
achieved the dignity of that sleek smooth head, and
those fair large ears, which Titania has been caress-
ing, and decorating with musk-roses, to miss their befit-
ting provender. ' I had rather have a handful or two of
dry peas.' It comes so naturally to him to be an ass !
As for the coying of his amiable cheeks, and all the
other choice attentions of fairy royalty, he takes them
as a matter of course. ' I pray you, let none of your
people stir me ; I have an exposition of sleep come
upon me ; ' and so he dozes off to sleep, with a gentle
bray, enwound in the doting fairy's arms. When he
awakes again, he is all alone in the hawthorn brake.
His first thought is his cue ; as though he had, but
the moment before, gone, as Peter Quince says, ' to see
a noise that he heard, and is to come again.' But as he
finds that all have stolen hence, and left him to his sleep,
he falls back on his experiences in Wonderland. ' I
have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream,
past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man
is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.'

Yet though Bottom is an ass, he is no fool. He is
indeed wrapped up in the supremest ignorance of * rude
mechanicals that work for bread upon Athenian stalls.'
Of such wisdom as belongs to the schools, or was
taught in the porch, he makes no pretence ; but of
mother wit he has his full share. His sublime con-
ceit rests in part on a certain consciousness of innate
power. He is unabashed by rank, undaunted by diffi-
culties, ready at a moment's notice for all emergencies,
thoroughly cool and self-reliant. No wonder that he
can look a duke in the face He has been accustomed

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

J71

to take the lead among his fellow mechanics, and to
have his counsels followed as a matter of course. Nick-
Bottom is a natural genius, of a type by no means
rare. There is a consequential aldcrmanic absolutism
about him, familiar to many a civic council-board. He
gives his opinions on the play, in all its intricacies
and perplexities, with an infallibility which no Shake-
spearean commentator could surpass. ' Tis a very good
piece of work, and a merry ; ' though his own part
' will ask some tears in the true performing of it.'
Duke Theseus, when witnessing the actual performance,
ventures on a comment ; but Bottom, in the midst of
his most tender Pyramus-vein, is ready with his ' No,
in truth, sir,' and will play, not only actor, but com-
mentator too.

There are Bottoms everywhere. Nor are they with-
out their uses. Vanity becomes admirable when carried
out with such sublime unconsciousness ; and here it is
a vanity resting on some solid foundation, and finding
expression in the assumption of a leadership which
his fellows recognise as his own by right. If he will
play the lion's part, ' let him roar again ! ' Look
where we will, we may chance to come on ' sweet
bully Bottom.' In truth there is so much of genuine
human nature in this hero of ' A Midsummer Night's
Dream,' that it may not always be safe to peep into
the looking-glass, lest evolution reassert itself for our
special behoof, and his familiar countenance greet us,
' Hail fellow, well met, give me your neif ! ' > .

INDEX

Aiiaxagoras, 141.
Anaximander, 141.
Andaman Islanders, 14.
Anthropophagi, 45, 73.
Antipodes, 70.
Araf'iras, 103.
Arbrousset, M., 105.
Ariel, 46, 48, 60, 81, 179.
Atlantis, the. 37.
Australian, the, 28, 142.

Bacon, 10.

Ballads, Scottish, 146.

Berkeley, 3.

Bik, M., 103.

Borneo, 43.

Bottom, Nick, 175, 242, 264.

Brain, Gorilla's, 21, 24.

„ Orang's, 24.

„ Human, 21, 24.
Browne, Sir T., 4. "•
Browning, 12, 94, 107, 136, 144.
Bums, 167.
Burton, Captain, 140, 152.

Carib, 72.

Collier, J. P., 200, 225, 232.
Columbus, 70, 79.
Commentators, the, 194. .

Craik, Prof., 206. ^

Creeds, 133, 139, i43-
Cunningham, Allan, 168.

D'Avenant, 59, 61, 62. 2o''>.
Davy, Sir II., 8, 123.
Dea'.h, 114, 121.
Democritus, 2.
Dog, the, 96.
Dreams, 128,
Driopethecus, 19.
Dryden, 10, 59, 61, 137, 2 1 6.
Duncan, Dr. J., 94.

Eden, R., 53.
Engis skull, 22.
Ewaipanoma, 45.

Fairies, 166. .

Faith, 125.
Figuier, L., 7.
Fire-making, 16, 80.
Fletcher, 62.
Folios, the, 2ri.
Fuegians, 31, 32.

Gervinus, 80, 13'/.
Ghosts, 155.
God, Idea of, 95, I33-
Gorilla, ai, 24, 29.
Griffon, the, 15.

Harriott, Thos., 49.
Hazlitt, 80, 137-
i His, the neuter, 250.

T T^

>74

INDEX.

Hobbes, lo.

Ho^'g, 169.

Horn, Franz, 14.

Hunter. Mr. J., 45. 50. 74, 205, 218.

Huxley, ao, 33.

Immortality, belief in, 125, 134.
Indians, American, 33, 104, 106.
Ipolaynes, 15,

Kaffirs, io6.

Knight, C., 318, 330. 340.

Lampeduia, 45.

Lane, Ralpli, 4(;.

Laud, Dr., lor.

Linnaeus, 17.

Lubbocit, 23, 95, 140, 14a.

Lyell, 23.

Magic, 81, 83.

Mandeville, 14. -

Meres, 191.

Metre, 200, 209.

Midsummer Night's Dream, 67, 165,

239-
Milton, 171.
Mind, 92, 137.
Miranda, 56, 59, 76,
Montaigne, 52.
Moral Sense, the, 20, J34.
More, Sir T., 52.

Neanderthal skull, 33.

Orang, the, 1 7.
Owen. 31.

Polo, Marco, r4.
Pongo, the, r6, 80.
Pope, 58, 195, 204. 263.
Prospero, 13, 76, 80.
Puck, 166, 182.
Purchas, 15,
Purgatory, 146, 156.

Raleigh, 45, 69.
Religion, 95, loi, 139.
Rhythm, 300, 209.
Rowe, Nicholas, 213, 243.

Salamanca council, 70.
Schlegel, 80, 137.
Scottish ballads, 146. 148.
Sekesa, 105.
Setebos, 53, 98, 100.
Spencer. H., 1 28,
Spenser, 69.
Supernatural, the, 124, 140.

Tamlane, 147, 148.
Tempest, the 13, 55, 147, 222.
Tennyson, 126.
Theobald, 58, J94, 200, 221.

Utopia, 53.

Warburton, 196.
White, R, G., 322, 328.
Witches, 147, 222.

210

7550 4