and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire. For, judged by
what was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core,
human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at its
best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life. And that creed
which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus:
_Eternity bids you to goodness_. However much there was of error, of
misapplied force, of moral injury, there was a vast, multiform, mighty
culture of men in chastity, in charity, in the victories and the joys of
the spirit. The church set the Virgin Mother as a heavenly consoler, and
showed as the divinest thing a man who died for love of men. Before the
imagination of the oppressor, the robber, the licentious, it set a
flaming sword of retribution. To the poor, the sorrowful, the
broken-hearted, it offered the blessed assurance, _This world and the
next are God's_. It opened to them a communion in thought and feeling
with holy and blessed souls in the invisible realm. Life was hard and
troublous; priests and bishops sometimes made the trouble worse; but
there was the sense of a heavenly rule over all, the struggle toward a
heavenly attainment.
The whole moral appeal of the church rested on the superterrestrial world
which it asserted and pictured. It was a world whose existence was
vouched solely by an inward assent of the mind. For outward government,
there were bishops and popes, kings and magistrates. But all moral
authority, all incitement to holiness, all spiritual joy and hope, rested
on this unseen world as accepted by the mind. Disbelieve, and all was
lost! And so, of necessity, _belief_ was the fundamental, the essential
thing. Obey the church, believe the creed,--that was the supreme double
requirement.
That imaginations when believed as these were believed exercised a mighty
power is beyond question. That the power was in a degree for good is
also clear. But the vast dislocation between the supposed and the real
worlds involved enormous failure and waste.
On the one hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal world
simply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men and
women whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows and
pleasures of the world about them. To make a future heaven and hell take
any hold of them at all, the church had to translate its mysteries and
sublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial. It brought in
penalties of a substantial sort,--penance and excommunication, the rack
and the stake. It constantly appealed to fear. And after all, there
remained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silent
indifference and unbelief. The priest said these things were so,--the
priests all said so,--and the priest was backed by the bishop, and the
bishop by the Pope. Well, perhaps they knew--and perhaps they did n't.
The chance that they were right made it worth while to go to church on
Sunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; to
avoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their good
offices when one came to die. But the belief in their heaven and hell
was not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice,
pride to which men were prone.
That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under all
the forms of Protestant supernaturalism. Part of it, no doubt, may be
referred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appeal
to look much beyond the immediate present. But in great part too it
springs from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world which
the preacher so fluently and fervently declares.
It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the mass of men
did believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church. But what
hardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church's
doctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life.
This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the human
body and its laws, the passion of sex, productive industry, the
organization of society,--in short, with all the impulses, instincts, and
powers of man,--through a cloud of misapprehension.
The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significant
as the antechamber to another. Hence its occupations, responsibilities,
joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directly
related to the other life. This naturally bred a false attitude toward
many of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engage
the attention of men.
The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit.
The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to human
weakness.
Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit. The charter of divine truth
was the Bible, and its interpreter was the church. Since this world was
only the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pass away, it was
idle to spend much study on it.
Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mere
elucidation of the dogmas of the church. As soon as those dogmas were
even remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril. In repressing
heretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church was
discharging a plain duty.
Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue.
One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain. The highest symbol of
religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.
The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous
and ghastly brood of imaginations. How far the dread thus inspired acted
as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess. Too well we know the torture
it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which
mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind,
which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more
unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.
Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the
mediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had
their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other
directions bore noble fruit.
Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from
it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the
master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.
There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared with
the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. Hell,
Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification,
his hope.
Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of
men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is a
force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and
woman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundred
years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry,
half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a
"new life."
Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the
"Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy
which has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol it
is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul for
what lies beyond its full grasp.
In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives by
the ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is his
self-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after a
lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light
of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it
with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. The
anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is
absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls
traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its
reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.
Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen
centuries of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms and
in wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which
seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sin
whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an
imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows
against a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and in
his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--lust, cruelty,
treachery. The physical hell he imagines in another world is the
counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world. In his
Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modern
reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.
In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and
spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seeming
to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.
In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of
military force. Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its
own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment
running into fantasy.
Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first by
the association of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.
Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with
the East.
A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced
society.
Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.
Printing made the Reformation possible.
The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of
discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the
church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real
knowledge.
The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England,--the
merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary
party.
A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--the
use of canals, textile machinery, steam, electricity. This has created a
new class of rich. It has improved the condition of the laboring man,
not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more.
Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism,
giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper class; commerce,
discovery, invention, raising first the middle class and then the
lower,--these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated to
realize the ideal.
Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Roman
court. He made the quarrel on a moral question. No man, he said, could
sell a license from God to commit sin. If the Pope said otherwise, the
Pope was a liar and no vicegerent of God. So he put in the forefront of
the revolting forces a moral idea.
He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles,
and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood. He
gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue. He taught by word
and example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a life
consecrated to God.
He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest. He was
wholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life of
humanity. His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience,
under the forms of an antiquated theology. He was narrow; he confounded
the friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding of
the social and political needs of the time; he was full of superstition,
and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent and
wrathful. But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierly
temper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflective
men held back; and he won the leadership of the new age when against all
the pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth as
he saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"
Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther. For thirty-six
years--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working out
his theory. The book containing it he did not venture to publish, till
under Paul III. there was a lull in the storm. He was a loyal Catholic,
but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church. He kept alive
just long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the age
of seventy. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.
The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic
church. They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church,
claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its
morals, as in the matter of the indulgences. They found courage to do
it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of
pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the
church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly
without the church's intervention. That was one side of the revolt: the
other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong
enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be
impatient of any foreign control.
But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a
little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended
with the authority of the Roman priesthood. Theirs was in no sense an
intellectually creative movement. Politically and socially it had great
effects. Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_.
Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly. The early Protestants
found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human
nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by the
sense that authority was weakening. They saw no other resource, their
own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought
no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural
world. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its
spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught;
its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute. The traditional Protestant
orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled.
Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the
imagination is less strong.
But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a
supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on
the minds of men. Shakspere paints the most various, active, and
passionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark
with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost
unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's
brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a
hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth,
hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of
future retribution,--assure him only of success _here_, and
"We 'd jump the life to come."
It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some further
word of inadequate comment. Apparently no one in his day guessed that
among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this
obscure playwright was the intellectual king. But Time has more than
redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but
sometimes worshiped as an oracle. The prime secret of his power,
compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality.
It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays,
and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world. It is a change of
standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract
speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that
their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were
to attain with the new weapons. Shakspere has no thought of mankind's
advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds
and portrays the universe about him. We get some idea of what the change
means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of
mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp
division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored,
genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the
dramatist's page. Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the
profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a
phantasmagoria. In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we
have lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthly
life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.
In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue
and vice. In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds
of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness,
purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the most
critical point, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have
touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always
leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil. It is
striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions.
His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which
had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the
infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual
putrescence. In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare
has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs
sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that
Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing
little discredit and no punishment. Later in the great plays the note of
chastity is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is nobly
depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a
passionate abhorrence of vice. In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra,"
it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless
love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and
Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion,
escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that
redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.
In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared,
but the moral law is still supreme. Yet in some ways it is a very
unsatisfying world. In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy.
All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of
rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness
there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace
that passeth understanding." We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of
the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by
any solution. There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I
am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at
prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant
deliverance. We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and
Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher
manhood. Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate. Man's
confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet."
The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters;
it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest
sensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of
confusion, of unfathomable mystery. The ghost from the other world is a
mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank
paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick,
and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones
does not even occur to Hamlet as a question. Yet when he is tempted to
take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is
sufficient to deter him. The thought suggests no hope, only a vague
restraining fear. But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in
the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself
with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of
wrong-doing. The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom
over the whole drama.
It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that
we miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to human
nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowhere
depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and
resolutely pursued. His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear
and high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking.
He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid
us to live our own life. His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a
phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or
strength to our wavering will.
Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere
is wholesome and even invigorating. We are helped in our higher life by
many influences besides direct moral teaching. One takes a twenty-mile
tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes
from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener. So from an
hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier
being. It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though
seen but in part.
The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the
personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing was
thus colored. We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the
sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his
marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings;
the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of
a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town.
There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life in
the Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a passion delicate and profound,
striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness in
the object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover. More distinct
is the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town,
the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will. Prosaic
enough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that this
great genius and passionate soul bore himself among the materialities,
where so many make shipwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness which
brought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age. So
much Shakspere certainly had in himself,--this homely yet vital
self-command. With this is to be taken that he had also that
intellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is the
creation of great works of art. Self-control, prudential and
intellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity and
strength.
One loves to see in "The Tempest" the crowning utterance of his maturity.
How wise, how noble it is, and the wisdom and nobility set forth in what
exquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor! As in Hamlet we seem to see
Shakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think we
recognize the ideal of his ripeness. There is the wise man torn from
books and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea;
there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; struggle
with bestial evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in the
happiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; the
admonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of passion. So wise,
so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation. A shadow flits
across, in the thought of mortal transiency:--
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep."
Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment:
"Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;" the coming encounter
with Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating
impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence
divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the
mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end.