"The Tempest" is a little enchanted world where play all the forces that
are manifested in the larger creation from the lowest animalism to the
highest manhood, harmonious with his invisible environment. This world
in miniature--true to the laws of the macrocosm--begins in chaos, storm,
and stress, but finds completion in supernal air and divine peace. We
shall find by consecutive study of the dramas that the poet, in his
creative work, has ever risen from lower manifestations to higher as his
own soul soared on higher and higher wing. Prospero was his last,
greatest, and divinest thought of man in his unfolding godward.
Nature in her evolution takes no vast strides, and her supreme poet
follows her divine current of growth from the animal man to the grand
manifestation of his ideal. He understood that in man's unfolding not a
round could be missed of the "Jacob's Ladder" resting upon the earth,
but reaching into the heavens.
In this ideal world of "The Tempest," Caliban stands upon the earth
groping to attain the first step, while Prospero stands upon the summit
with his face heavenward. This typical man comes upon the stage on a
high plane of development. Long previously he had left the rank and file
of humanity to tread the ever lonely path to higher achievement,
therefore we must look below him to find, among the creations of the
poet, the incarnation which was the chrysalis for this last ideal. Here
our intuitive perception immediately descries Hamlet, that wonderful
human mystery who was the first of Shakspere's sons to enter the
precincts of the inner life and catch a glimpse of the godlike
potentialities of the human soul.
In Hamlet was the struggle of birth; in Prospero, the glory of
achievement, the fulfilment to some extent of the poet's ideal man, and
the first to realize that the power of thought is the supreme force in
the universe. Hamlet caught the first glimpse of this truth when he
said, "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." He is the
hero of spiritual birth and growth in man from the dawning of the
soul-life, through its fierce struggles to dominate the lower self and
rise into realms of clearer light and truth. The "godlike reason which
was not left in him to rust unused," in its aspiration became
illuminated by intuition and revealed to his awe-inspired gaze new
worlds not dreamed of by the Horatios of his time.
Hamlet was lost in wonder at himself. The lower forces of his nature
along the old inherited lines of thought, coming in contact with the
higher thought-currents, newly created, caused the blended stream to
"turn awry and lose the name of action," termed by the unseeing world
lack of courage and will-power. Even he could not understand but that in
some inexplicable way he _must_ be a coward, because he could not
perceive the _why_ of his delaying vengeance. Yet he knew he was brave
to the core of his being. When his military friends, "distilled almost
to jelly with the act of fear," would have restrained him from following
the spirit of his father, he cries out:
Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin's fee;
and for my soul, what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as
itself? ... My fate cries out, and makes each petty artery in this
body as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
He was strong of will and resolute of purpose, but had reached the plane
of development where his higher nature would not permit him to commit
murder. Yet the strong current of popular opinion, as well as all
hereditary and sub-conscious influences in himself, were ever impelling
him to do the deed. In his soul-growth, Hamlet had passed the plane of
revenge as a passion, but had not reached the divine heights of
forgiveness. To avenge the murder of his father was to him a sacred
command and duty coming in conflict with another equally sacred duty
voiced by his higher self, and the mighty meeting of these two
soul-forces always resulted in inaction. This moral battleground is the
pivotal point of the drama, indirectly putting in motion all the forces
which terminate in the final catastrophe.
In his thoughtful moods his disposition was ever shaken with "thoughts
beyond the reaches of our souls," saying, "Why is this? wherefore? what
should we do?" It was the unlaid ghost of his higher self that
propounded these queries to the apparition. The birth-throes of thought
were giving him entrance into a new world where he began to see "What a
piece of work is man! how _infinite_ in faculty! in action how like an
angel! in apprehension how like a God!"
The thoughts that Hamlet voices had passed through Shakspere's brain,
and the wonderful powers manifested by Prospero had been apprehended by
his own prophetic vision. Hamlet might have moved along on the lower
plane successfully, but the law of spiritual growth, the divine force
upheaving and uplifting his soul against the barriers of his
sub-conscious mentality and his environment, finally ended in the sad
tragedy. Yet in the defeat was a victory, for it was merely the turn of
the spiral downward for a higher rise in evolution.
Prospero is first revealed to us at about the age of Hamlet when the
curtain falls and hides him from our tear-dimmed eyes. Shakspere loved
Hamlet. He was dearest to his heart of all his children, and he felt
that he must not die, but must come into the full fruition of the
immortals. The soul so nobly struggling from its swaddling clothes
_must_ become a freed spirit of godlike power. Therefore he presents to
us an ideal world where Hamlet sits upon the throne as Prospero,
"transported and rapt in secret studies," "neglecting worldly ends, all
dedicated to closeness and the bettering of his mind with that which
o'erprized all popular rate." Prospero was born a higher type, therefore
the divine in him had freer action. His soul opened to the over-soul
like a flower to the sunlight.
The divine force in man is his will--his true will--and this force in
its perfect exercise has no human limitation. It is only the _seeming_
will that is limited. This power, _manifested in thought_, is
represented by Ariel.
The statement of Prospero that his studies bettered his mind to such
high degree is proof that they were those not of the magician, but of
the philosopher and true psychologist, for the study of magic darkens
the soul and degrades the intellect. Prospero's power was not magical,
and Shakspere used the word magician only to bring the drama within
touch of his audience, knowing full well that the wise would understand,
for "wisdom is justified of her children."
In the manifestation of soul-power we first perceive the true greatness
of Prospero and the heights to which Shakspere's own soul had risen, for
"the stream cannot rise higher than its source." The greatness of Julius
Caesar is "weighed in the balance and found wanting," for every truly
great nature must be the rounded out and harmonious development of the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual. This is the measure of Prospero, and
in his unfolding, unseen realms and previously unknown powers had
opened, according to eternal law, to his demanding soul.
"The Tempest" is philosophical, psychological, and occult--philosophical
because thought is the motor power. Le Conte says: "That deepest of all
questions--the nature and origin of natural forces--is a question for
philosophy and not for science." Thought is a natural force; yes, a
dynamic force of the most intense power. It may be a search-light of the
universe, a thunderbolt of destruction, or a messenger of light and love
with healing in its wings. The mantle of Prospero is simply an emblem of
power, and the word is so understood among the Orientals. In Scripture,
when Elijah ascended in his fiery chariot, his mantle fell upon Elisha,
who immediately caused the waters to retreat from its stroke and
continued clothed with his master's power. So Prospero, robing himself
in his mantle or laying it aside, means his exercise or non-exercise of
what are termed supernatural powers.
Victor Hugo says that Shakspere "did not question the invisible world,
he rehabilitated it. He did not deny man's supernatural power, he
consecrated it." There is no reason why man in his higher estate should
not have free intercourse with a world invisible to him in his lower
conditions. Can the grub have the same companionship as the butterfly?
Victor Hugo also says that the "'Midsummer Night's Dream' depicts the
action of the invisible world on man, but 'The Tempest' symbolizes the
action of man on the invisible world. In the poet's youth, man obeys the
spirits. In the poet's ripe age, the _spirits obey man_." This shows a
fine apprehension of the interior revealings of the supreme poetic
genius. Every great and true poet is also a prophet and seer. Then why
should not Shakspere--the supremest in all the "tide of time"--not have
the widest and most far-reaching vision of the wonderful attainments
and powers of the perfected man. He undoubtedly saw and felt the
grandeur of the ages to come, and knew, with divine prescience, that
only the hem of the garment of knowledge had been as yet touched. There
is but one power in the universe, and as Emerson says, "Every man is an
inlet to the whole." Then where is his limitation?
Did not nature obey the Nazarene, and the winds and mountainous waves
lie gently down at His bidding? And did He not say that His disciples
should do greater works than He had done? Then why should not Prospero,
as a typical man, have control over all the forces of nature?
It is interesting to note that Shakspere has given to him almost the
identical powers of the Man of Nazareth! This is not strange, as it is
an absolute truth that when man rises to the royalty of spirit every
element will be his obedient servant. Thought will be the agent of his
ministries; which the poet has so marvellously portrayed in its
personification as Ariel. Ariel says: "Thy thoughts I cleave to;" and
Prospero, in calling him, "Come with a thought." It is now claimed by
the most advanced and best psychologists, that a forceful, living
thought does become a real embodiment which may be perceived by the
finer senses. Ariel was what the mind of his master made him, sometimes
a sprite, sometimes a sea-nymph, again a harpy, anything and everything
the master directed.
Sycorax symbolized ignorance, and thought had been long imprisoned in
the holds of nature by this creature of darkness, but ever painfully
struggling to reach the light. Ignorance imprisoned thought, but could
not free it. Prospero, as wisdom, gave it freedom and directed its
action until he could send it forth in still more glorious freedom.
Freedom of thought is a dominant strain in the drama, and is even sung
by the "reeling ripe" Stephano. Caliban represents the child of
ignorance, closely allied to nature and partaking of its poetry and
grandeur. He is man in his first estate, just emerging from the animal.
Yet, in this crude, forbidding aspect how superior in dignity compared
with Stephano and Trinculo in their vile abasement through the vices of
civilization.
Shakspere's knowledge of the power of thought over the body is shown in
his saying that Sycorax, "through age and envy, had grown into a hoop;"
and of Caliban that, "As with age his body uglier grows, so his mind
cankers." It is not strange that Shakspere perceived the new psychology,
for Milton sang--
Oft Converse with heavenly habitants
Begins to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal.
The poet Spenser most beautifully expresses this truth in saying:
So every spirit, as it is more pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in....
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
This is the teaching also of St. Paul, that the body must be transformed
by the renewing of the mind.
Here we perceive the source of the heavenly beauty and grace of Miranda.
"The pure in heart shall see God." Her thought and vision wrought out
for her a bodily expression that made her seem celestial to the
beholder, and held him in doubt whether she were goddess or mortal.
In esoteric thought the perfected being must be an equal blending of the
masculine and feminine, which Balzac has so gloriously interpreted in
his "Seraphita." This quality we see in Prospero, the gentle, refined
element of motherhood, blended with sublime dignity and strength. His
child was to him "a cherubim infusing him with fortitude from heaven,"
and he gave to her the richest dower of inheritance--knowledge, with
purity of heart and purpose. With the gentle patience of love he
instructed her in the laws of nature and her being, with divine purity
of thought. For all nature is pure as God himself. Thus Miranda became
the peerless young Eve of blended wisdom and innocence.
After a display of his power, he states, in his address to Ferdinand,
the most abstruse problems of the ideal philosophy.
These ... were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
This sublime inspiration was almost the last outburst of the mighty
genius of Shakspere, and is a fitting crown of glory.
Prospero was fully conscious of his superiority, and with simple but
grandest dignity he claims that practically it was his own power that
worked all the wonders. Most sublimely he expresses this when he calls
before him his invisible helpers:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; ... by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art.
Passing from his power over nature to the manifestation of his higher
self with men, we see the spiritual plane he had reached. In coming
again in contact with the world of humanity his first action is the
recognition of the good and the forgiving the evil:
--O good Gonzalo,
My true preserver, and a loyal sir
To him thou follow'st, I will pay thy graces
Home both in word and deed.
His divine forgiveness of those who had so cruelly wronged him shows the
height of his spiritual attainment:
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part; the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
In the very remarkable events of his life he recognizes a higher power
in all his guidance. "Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue should
become kings of Naples?"
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Roughhew them how we will.
In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character.
Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere's latest thought, but
only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is
beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere
had _lived_ Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human
soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a
promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the
wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This
is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between "Hamlet" and "The
Tempest."
If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever
increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that
lofty height where, from the "pattern on the mount," he would have
portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul
irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of
awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require
one still.
Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the
truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of
another:
He sits 'mongst men like a descended God:
He hath a kind of honor sets him off,
More than a mortal seeming.