Caliban; the missing link

II

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO.

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1873 [ All rights reserved.']

OXFORD:

Ey T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, E, Pickard Hall, and J. H. Stacy,

PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.

3D I a n c §L g t c I,

MY SHAKESPEARE SCHOLAR,

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED

VERY LOVINGLY

BY HEE FATHER.

Chap. I. In The Beginning

II. THE CALIBAN OF EVOLUTION

in. Caliban's island

IV. THE TEMPEST

V. THE MONSTER CALIBAN

VI. CALIBAN, THE METAPHYSICIAN

VII. CALIBAN, THE THEOLOGIAN .

VIII. THE SUPERNATURAL

IX. GHOSTS AND WITCHES

X. FAIRY FOLK-LORE

XL THE COMMENTATORS .

XII. THE FOLIOS

XIII. NOTES ON 'THE TEMPEST ' .

XIV. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

PAGE

vii i

92 114 140

155 166

194 21 1 222 239

Preface

'I'll believe as soon This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon Ma)' through the centre creep, and so displace Her brother's noontide with the Antipodes. It cannot be.' — A Midsummer Night's Dream.

THE Antipodes, in Shakespeare's day, were beings for whom the world, and all which pertains to it, were turned upside down. The ideas entertained of them were of the very vaguest kind ; the capacity of belief in regard to them was restrained by no ordinary limits of experience or analogy. The most that could be affirmed with any confidence in regard to them, seemed to be that they must exist under conditions in all respects the reverse of our own ; and with their heads, if not absolutely where their heels should be, yet somewhere else than on their shoulders. The sun was below, and the earth above them. They were manifestly beings with which fancy had free scope to sport at will.

' The cannibals that each other eat,' concerning whom Othello discoursed to his admiring auditors, are now very familiar to us. Of that other class of 'anthropophagi, whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,' ocular testimony seems more remote than ever. ' When

PREFACE.

we were boys,' says Gonzalo, in 'The Tempest,' '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 appreciative 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 capable of proving the source, not merely of pastime, but of supreme delight to the mere pleasure seeker. But

PREFACE.

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 ordinary tale or novel. When such a mere dallier, as the youthful reader is apt to be, has become a loving student, 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 bookstall 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 Shakespeare, 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

PREFACE.

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 comprehends every phase of human character, every impulse and passion of the human soul, every conceivable stage of development of the human mind.

In this age, which, not altogether without justification, 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 that 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 received undoubtingly as true. As to Sir Thomas Browne, who is accepted in the following pages as, in some respects, the representative of a later 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

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not ; because I stand not yet assured which is the right side of a man, or whether there be any such distinction in nature. That she was edified out of the rib of Adam I believe, yet raise no question who shall arise with that rib at the 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 conception lay remote from every theme with which his mind delighted to dally ; and far apart from all those deeper thoughts on which he mused and pondered, till they assumed immortal embodiment in his own Hamlet. And yet he had thought out, and there sets forth with profoundest significance, the essential distinctions and attributes of humanity :—

' What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed ? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse f Looking before and after, 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 true brute and man, which, if the new theory of descent from crudest animal organisms be true, was our prede-

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cessor and precursor in the inheritance of this world of humanity. We 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 Shakespeare'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 conjectural 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 imperfect 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 any difficulty in enjoying it, till he has turned to the commentators, and learns how sorely they have been perplexing themselves over its riddles.

PREFACE.

Yet commentators have done good service in this, if in no other respect. They have led to the diligent study of Shakespeare, even if it were at times only ' of envy and strife.' But for the well-timed, though indiscriminate 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 delayed. 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 Shakespeare, the authorship of a 'transversion' which is without 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 the name

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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 believed, of a copy of the Chandos portrait : —

' Shakespeare, thy gift, I place before my sight ; With awe I ask his blessing ere I write; With reverence look on his majestic face ; Proud to be less, but of his god-like race.'

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 Cibber 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 affirm, 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 original manuscripts, stage copies, the memories of living actors, and the texts of earlier quartos, to appeal to,

PREFACE.

the race of commentators would have had no pretext

for textual recension ; — yet in high estimation of their

author's works, it is not easy for any later critic to

surpass them. There, too, in the same folio, where

their appreciative preface proves that Shakespeare was

a true hero even to his fellow players, surly Ben Jonson,

forgetting all his old irascibilities, writes of his ' star

of poets ' —

' Soul of the age, The applause ! delight ! the wonder of the stage ! My Shakespeare.'

Another contemporary, Leonard D'igges, 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 'Caesar' could ravish the audience, when they would not brook Jonson's tedious ' Catiline.' His Othello and Falstaff, his Beatrice, Benedick, and ' Malvolio, that cross-garter'd gull,' would crowd 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 ovation ; 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 surprise us to draw forth treasures new and old ; and here, in his

PREFACE.

Caliban, 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.

University College, Toronto,

Chapter I. In The Beginning

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

IN the 'Medley' of the Poet-Laureat, when the tale of the Princess 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 science, 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

F

IN THE BEGINNING.

But this question, ' Whence, and what are we ?' is not to be repressed, either by shouting crowds or by brooding silences. The activity of the reasoning 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 intelligences. 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 intelligences, 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

IN THE BEGINNING.

discussion, the use of terms which have been appropriated by the theologian. But the human element, 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 philosophical speculation, mind and matter have marshalled their rival champions to the 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, Till 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 woaded, 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 conception of such a Supreme Divine Intelligence seems to commend itself to finite reason. It is easier to conceive 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, with 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 premonitions 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

IN THE BEGINNING.

prince to the charity of such good angels, and busied himself with his ' Pseudodoxia Epidemica ' or inquiries into many commonly presumed truths, and 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 problems 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 Shakespeare ridiculed, even while turning it to account. But still more does he link the age that preceded with the

IN THE BEGINNING.

one to which, in point of time, he belonged, by the singular interblending of scepticism with a devout credulity : 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 hermaphrodite before there was a woman.' In this and like manner he glances in inconsequential fashion at thoughts which are now presented to all minds 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 to any recognisable belief of the new era. The nonconformity which receives 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 orthodoxy 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 demonstrated. With a generous denouncement of all intolerance, the modern evolutionist presents his axioms to the questioner, and passes on. Infallibility has deserted the chair of St. Peter, and finds itself at home on a new throne. It is perilous to mediate in the inquiries which now occupy a foremost place in deduction, in-

IN THE BEGINNING.

duction, and scientific research. There are indeed among the leaders of thought, men of calm judicial sobriety, whose decisions are presented in so attractive a form as to invite from the thoughtful mind the most careful examination before they are rejected. But 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 psychical 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 BEGINNING.

Humphrey Davy, wrought into the ingenious daydream 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 induction 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 involves, 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 preserve the fancy in due subordination to the actual demonstrations 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

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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 would 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 evolutionist 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 progenitor 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.