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Tickard Hall, and J. H. Stacy, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY. J €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 I 13 .39 56 67 92 114 MO 155 166 194 21 1 222 239 I f 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 % * I PRE FACE. ix 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 i PR El' ACE. XI 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. xm V 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. \v 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.' /?• B 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 I /.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 • b i.! „__^.^ i I LV THE BEGINNING, \ L^ 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 • 1 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- I ^ 1 IN THE BEGINNING. ti 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 10 IN THE BEGINNING. 1 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. II 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 la 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." . H 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 i6 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. "7 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 C i8 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 m 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 so 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- I 1 THE CAUnAN^ OF EVOLUTION. 21 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. H 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 I 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. 26 THE C A Lin AN OF EVOLUTION. I 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. 27 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 38 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 i I .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. n 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 36 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. ^1 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- 38 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, 40 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 'I I II 42 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. 43 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. i! 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, — .. I CALIBAN'S ISLAND. 48 ' 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 f 46 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. 47 ' 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 48 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. 49 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. St 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 52 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. 53 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 54 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. w 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 &6 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. 57 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. 59 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.' -~ - • I 60 THE TEMPEST. I 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. 6i 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 If ll Cj 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. 63 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 64 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 F f 66 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. I 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 68 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 ' PI 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. 69 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, f I .' ;'! yo 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 ' 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, (!) 74 THE MONSTER CALIBAN. If A 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. 7S 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 pm^ ^a /y # ^V^v >^ 4 % IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT^3) 1.0 I.I ■^ KM III 2.2 Hr i;& mil 2.0 1.25 1.4 1.6 Photographic Sciences Corpomtion & 23 WEST MAIN STR£ET WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 (716) 872-4503 is ' 1 mmm mm 'I' m 76 T//B A:0NSTER CALIBAN. ! h 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. 77 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' n 78 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. 79 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 „_ 8o 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. 8i 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 82 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 84 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 86 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. H; 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. 88 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. 89 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 90 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. 91 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. 93 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- 94 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. 95 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 96 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. 97 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 H 98 CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN. I 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. 99 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 M 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. I 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, i9 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. n 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