Among My Books
by
James Russell Lowell

Part 4 out of 6



"This castle hath a pleasant seat, the air
Nimbly and sweetly doth commend itself
Unto our gentle senses.
This _guest_ of summer,
The _temple-haunting_ martlet, doth approve
By his _loved mansionry_ that the heaven's breath
Smells _wooingly_ here; no jutty, frieze,
Buttress, or coigne of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle."

The contrast here cannot but be as intentional as it is marked. Every
image is one of welcome, security, and confidence. The summer, one may
well fancy, would be a very different hostess from her whom we have just
seen expecting _them_. And why _temple-haunting_, unless because it
suggests sanctuary? _O immaginativa, che si ne rubi delle cose di fuor_,
how infinitely more precious are the inward ones thou givest in return!
If all this be accident, it is at least one of those accidents of which
only this man was ever capable. I divine something like it now and then
in Aeschylus, through the mists of a language which will not let me be
sure of what I see, but nowhere else. Shakespeare, it is true, had, as I
have said, as respects English, the privilege which only first-comers
enjoy. The language was still fresh from those sources at too great a
distance from which it becomes fit only for the service of prose.
Wherever he dipped, it came up clear and sparkling, undefiled as yet by
the drainage of literary factories, or of those dye-houses where the
machine-woven fabrics of sham culture are colored up to the last
desperate style of sham sentiment. Those who criticise his diction as
sometimes extravagant should remember that in poetry language is
something more than merely the vehicle of thought, that it is meant to
convey the sentiment as much as the sense, and that, if there is a beauty
of use, there is often a higher use of beauty.

What kind of culture Shakespeare had is uncertain; how much he had is
disputed; that he had as much as he wanted, and of whatever kind he
wanted, must be clear to whoever considers the question. Dr. Farmer has
proved, in his entertaining essay, that he got everything at second-hand
from translations, and that, where his translator blundered, he loyally
blundered too. But Goethe, the man of widest acquirement in modern times,
did precisely the same thing. In his character of poet he set as little
store by useless learning as Shakespeare did. He learned to write
hexameters, not from Homer, but from Voss, and Voss found them faulty;
yet somehow _Hermann und Dorothea_ is more readable than _Luise_. So far
as all the classicism then attainable was concerned, Shakespeare got it
as cheap as Goethe did, who always bought it ready-made. For such
purposes of mere aesthetic nourishment Goethe always milked other
minds,--if minds those ruminators and digesters of antiquity into asses'
milk may be called. There were plenty of professors who were forever
assiduously browsing in vales of Enna and on Pentelican slopes among the
vestiges of antiquity, slowly secreting lacteous facts, and not one of
them would have raised his head from that exquisite pasturage, though Pan
had made music through his pipe of reeds. Did Goethe wish to work up a
Greek theme? He drove out Herr Boettiger, for example, among that fodder
delicious to him for its very dryness, that sapless Arcadia of
scholiasts, let him graze, ruminate, and go through all other needful
processes of the antiquarian organism, then got him quietly into a corner
and milked him. The product, after standing long enough, mantled over
with the rich Goethean cream, from which a butter could be churned, if
not precisely classic, quite as good as the ancients could have made out
of the same material. But who has ever read the _Achilleis_, correct in
all _un_essential particulars as it probably is?

It is impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other respects, made
such booty of the world around him, whose observation of manners was so
minute, and whose insight into character and motives, as if he had been
one of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without question,
as we do Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his
confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy instinct
rather than to the conscientious perfecting of exceptional powers till
practice made them seem to work independently of the will which still
directed them,--it is impossible that such a man should not also have
profited by the converse of the cultivated and quick-witted men in whose
familiar society he lived, that he should not have over and over again
discussed points of criticism and art with them, that he should not have
had his curiosity, so alive to everything else, excited about those
ancients whom university men then, no doubt, as now, extolled without too
much knowledge of what they really were, that he should not have heard
too much rather than too little of Aristotle's _Poetics_, Quinctilian's
_Rhetoric_, Horace's _Art of Poetry_, and the _Unities_, especially from
Ben Jonson,--in short, that he who speaks of himself as

"Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what he most enjoyed contented least,"

and who meditated so profoundly on every other topic of human concern,
should never have turned his thought to the principles of that art which
was both the delight and business of his life, the bread-winner alike for
soul and body. Was there no harvest of the ear for him whose eye had
stocked its garners so full as wellnigh to forestall all after-comers?
Did he who could so counsel the practisers of an art in which he never
arrived at eminence, as in Hamlet's advice to the players, never take
counsel with himself about that other art in which the instinct of the
crowd, no less than the judgment of his rivals, awarded him an easy
pre-eminence? If he had little Latin and less Greek, might he not have
had enough of both for every practical purpose on this side pedantry? The
most extraordinary, one might almost say contradictory, attainments have
been ascribed to him, and yet he has been supposed incapable of what was
within easy reach of every boy at Westminster School. There is a
knowledge that comes of sympathy as living and genetic as that which
comes of mere learning is sapless and unprocreant, and for this no
profound study of the languages is needed.

If Shakespeare did not know the ancients, I think they were at least as
unlucky in not knowing him. But is it incredible that he may have laid
hold of an edition of the Greek tragedians, _Graece et Latine_, and then,
with such poor wits as he was master of, contrived to worry some
considerable meaning out of them? There are at least one or two
coincidences which, whether accidental or not, are curious, and which I
do not remember to have seen noticed. In the _Electra_ of Sophocles,
which is almost identical in its leading motive with _Hamlet_, the Chorus
consoles Electra for the supposed death of Orestes in the same
commonplace way which Hamlet's uncle tries with him.

[Greek: Thnaetou pephukas patros, Aelektra phronei;
Thnaetos d' Orestaes; oste mae lian stene,
Pasin gar aemin tout' opheiletai pathein.]

"Your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his....

But to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness....
'T is common; all that live must die."

Shakespeare expatiates somewhat more largely, but the sentiment in both
cases is almost verbally identical. The resemblance is probably a chance
one, for commonplace and consolation were always twin sisters, whom
always to escape is given to no man; but it is nevertheless curious. Here
is another, from the _Oedipus Coloneus_:--

[Greek: Tois toi dikaiois cho brachus nika megan.]

"Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just."

Hamlet's "prophetic soul" may be matched with the [Greek: promantis
thumos] of Peleus, (Eurip. Androm. 1075,) and his "sea of troubles," with
the [Greek: kakon pelagos] of Theseus in the _Hippolytus_, or of the
Chorus in the _Hercules Furens_. And, for manner and tone, compare the
speeches of Pheres in the _Alcestis_, and Jocasta in the _Phoenissae_,
with those of Claudio in _Measure for Measure_, and Ulysses in _Troilus
and Cressida_.

The Greek dramatists were somewhat fond of a trick of words in which
there is a reduplication of sense as well as of assonance, as in the
_Electra_:--

[Greek: Alektra gaeraskousan anumenaia te].

So Shakespeare:--

"Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled";

and Milton after him, or, more likely, after the Greek:--

"Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved."[129]

I mention these trifles, in passing, because they have interested me, and
therefore may interest others. I lay no stress upon them, for, if once
the conductors of Shakespeare's intelligence had been put in connection
with those Attic brains, he would have reproduced their message in a form
of his own. They would have inspired, and not enslaved him. His
resemblance to them is that of consanguinity, more striking in expression
than in mere resemblance of feature. The likeness between the
Clytemnestra--[Greek: gunaikos androboulon elpizon kear]--of Aeschylus
and the Lady Macbeth of Shakespeare was too remarkable to have escaped
notice. That between the two poets in their choice of epithets is as
great, though more difficult of proof. Yet I think an attentive student
of Shakespeare cannot fail to be reminded of something familiar to him in
such phrases as "flame-eyed fire," "flax-winged ships," "star-neighboring
peaks," the rock Salmydessus,

"Rude jaw of the sea,
Harsh hostess of the seaman, step-mother
Of ships,"

and the beacon with its "_speaking eye_ of fire." Surely there is more
than a verbal, there is a genuine, similarity between the [Greek:
anaerithmon gelasma] and "the unnumbered beach" and "multitudinous sea."
Aeschylus, it seems to me, is willing, just as Shakespeare is, to risk
the prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words, which may come up
the sices of hardy metaphor or the ambsace of conceit. There is such a
difference between far-reaching and far-fetching! Poetry, to be sure, is
always that daring one step beyond, which brings the right man to
fortune, but leaves the wrong one in the ditch, and its law is, Be bold
once and again, yet be not over-bold. It is true, also, that masters of
language are a little apt to play with it. But whatever fault may be
found with Shakespeare in this respect will touch a tender spot in
Aeschylus also. Does he sometimes overload a word, so that the language
not merely, as Dryden says, bends under him, but fairly gives way, and
lets the reader's mind down with the shock as of a false step in taste?
He has nothing worse than [Greek: pelagos anthoun nekrois]. A criticism,
shallow in human nature, however deep in Campbell's Rhetoric, has blamed
him for making persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whatever
other emotion, parenthesize some trifling play upon words in the very
height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms have either never
felt a passion or seen one in action, or else they forget the exaltation
of sensibility during such crises, so that the attention, whether of the
senses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be
overlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the more
sharp the ripple from any alien substance interposed. A passion that
looks forward, like revenge or lust or greed, goes right to its end, and
is straightforward in its expression; but a tragic passion, which is in
its nature unavailing, like disappointment, regret of the inevitable, or
remorse, is reflective, and liable to be continually diverted by the
suggestions of fancy. The one is a concentration of the will, which
intensifies the character and the phrase that expresses it; in the other,
the will is helpless, and, as in insanity, while the flow of the mind
sets imperatively in one direction, it is liable to almost ludicrous
interruptions and diversions upon the most trivial hint of involuntary
association. I am ready to grant that Shakespeare sometimes allows his
characters to spend time, that might be better employed, in carving some
cherry-stone of a quibble;[130] that he is sometimes tempted away from
the natural by the quaint; that he sometimes forces a partial, even a
verbal, analogy between the abstract thought and the sensual image into
an absolute identity, giving us a kind of serious pun. In a pun our
pleasure arises from a gap in the logical nexus too wide for the reason,
but which the ear can bridge in an instant. "Is that your own hare, or a
wig?" The fancy is yet more tickled where logic is treated with a mock
ceremonial of respect.

"His head was turned, _and so_ he chewed
His pigtail till he died."

Now when this kind of thing is done in earnest, the result is one of
those ill-distributed syllogisms which in rhetoric are called conceits.

"Hard was the hand that struck the blow,
Soft was the heart that bled."

I have seen this passage from Warner cited for its beauty, though I
should have thought nothing could be worse, had I not seen General
Morris's

"Her heart and morning broke together
In tears."

Of course, I would not rank with these Gloucester's

"What! will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Sink in the ground? I thought it would have mounted";

though as mere rhetoric it belongs to the same class.[131]

It might be defended as a bit of ghastly humor characteristic of the
speaker. But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two greater
Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the _Seven against Thebes_ we have:--

[Greek: en de gaia.
Zoa phonoruto
Memiktai, _karta d' eis' omaimoi_.]

And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own name
quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor does
the coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschylean
parallel. Even the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_ would have found a true
gossip in her of the _Agamemnon_, who is so indiscreet in her confidences
concerning the nursery life of Orestes. Whether Raleigh is right or not
in warning historians against following truth too close upon the heels,
the caution is a good one for poets as respects truth to Nature. But it
is a mischievous fallacy in historian or critic to treat as a blemish of
the man what is but the common tincture of his age. It is to confound a
spatter of mud with a moral stain.

But I have been led away from my immediate purpose. I did not intend to
compare Shakespeare with the ancients, much less to justify his defects
by theirs. Shakespeare himself has left us a pregnant satire on
dogmatical and categorical aesthetics (which commonly in discussion soon
lose their ceremonious tails and are reduced to the internecine dog and
cat of their bald first syllables) in the cloud-scene between Hamlet and
Polonius, suggesting exquisitely how futile is any attempt at a cast-iron
definition of those perpetually metamorphic impressions of the beautiful
whose source is as much in the man who looks as in the thing he sees. In
the fine arts a thing is either good in itself or it is nothing. It
neither gains nor loses by having it shown that another good thing was
also good in itself, any more than a bad thing profits by comparison with
another that is worse. The final judgment of the world is intuitive, and
is based, not on proof that a work possesses some of the qualities of
another whose greatness is acknowledged, but on the immediate feeling
that it carries to a high point of perfection certain qualities proper to
itself. One does not flatter a fine pear by comparing it to a fine peach,
nor learn what a fine peach is by tasting ever so many poor ones. The boy
who makes his first bite into one does not need to ask his father if or
how or why it is good. Because continuity is a merit in some kinds of
writing, shall we refuse ourselves to the authentic charm of Montaigne's
want of it? I have heard people complain of French tragedies because they
were so very French. This, though it may not be to some particular
tastes, and may from one point of view be a defect, is from another and
far higher a distinguished merit. It is their flavor, as direct a
telltale of the soil whence they drew it as that of French wines is.
Suppose we should tax the Elgin marbles with being too Greek? When will
people, nay, when will even critics, get over this self-defrauding trick
of cheapening the excellence of one thing by that of another, this
conclusive style of judgment which consists simply in belonging to the
other parish? As one grows older, one loses many idols, perhaps comes at
last to have none at all, though he may honestly enough uncover in
deference to the worshippers before any shrine. But for the seeming loss
the compensation is ample. These saints of literature descend from their
canopied remoteness to be even more precious as men like ourselves, our
companions in field and street, speaking the same tongue, though in many
dialects, and owning one creed under the most diverse masks of form.

Much of that merit of structure which is claimed for the ancient tragedy
is due, if I am not mistaken, to circumstances external to the drama
itself,--to custom, to convention, to the exigencies of the theatre. It
is formal rather than organic. The _Prometheus_ seems to me one of the
few Greek tragedies in which the whole creation has developed itself in
perfect proportion from one central germ of living conception. The motive
of the ancient drama is generally outside of it, while in the modern (at
least in the English) it is necessarily within. Goethe, in a thoughtful
essay,[132] written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet
in _Wilhelm Meister_, says that the distinction between the two is the
difference between _sollen_ and _wollen_, that is, between _must_ and
_would_. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained
by an inexorable Destiny, while the element of Freewill, and consequently
of choice, is the very axis of the modern. The definition is conveniently
portable, but it has its limitations. Goethe's attention was too
exclusively fixed on the Fate tragedies of the Greeks, and upon
Shakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom,
loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom.
In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of
the protagonist. In this sense it is modern, and is the first example of
true character-painting in tragedy. But, from whatever cause, that
exquisite analysis of complex motives, and the display of them in action
and speech, which constitute for us the abiding charm of fiction, were
quite unknown to the ancients. They reached their height in Cervantes and
Shakespeare, and, though on a lower plane, still belong to the upper
region of art in Le Sage, Moliere, and Fielding. The personages of the
Greek tragedy seem to be commonly rather types than individuals. In the
modern tragedy, certainly in the four greatest of Shakespeare's
tragedies, there is still something very like Destiny, only the place of
it is changed. It is no longer above man, but in him; yet the catastrophe
is as sternly foredoomed in the characters of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and
Hamlet as it could be by an infallible oracle. In Macbeth, indeed, the
Weird Sisters introduce an element very like Fate; but generally it may
be said that with the Greeks the character is involved in the action,
while with Shakespeare the action is evolved from the character. In the
one case, the motive of the play controls the personages; in the other,
the chief personages are in themselves the motive to which all else is
subsidiary. In any comparison, therefore, of Shakespeare with the
ancients, we are not to contrast him with them as unapproachable models,
but to consider whether he, like them, did not consciously endeavor,
under the circumstances and limitations in which he found himself, to
produce the most excellent thing possible, a model also in its own
kind,--whether higher or lower in degree is another question. The only
fair comparison would be between him and that one of his contemporaries
who endeavored to anachronize himself, so to speak, and to subject his
art, so far as might be, to the laws of classical composition. Ben Jonson
was a great man, and has sufficiently proved that he had an eye for the
external marks of character; but when he would make a whole of them, he
gives us instead either a bundle of humors or an incorporated idea. With
Shakespeare the plot is an interior organism, in Jonson an external
contrivance. It is the difference between man and tortoise. In the one
the osseous structure is out of sight, indeed, but sustains the flesh and
blood that envelop it, while the other is boxed up and imprisoned in his
bones.

I have been careful to confine myself to what may be called Shakespeare's
ideal tragedies. In the purely historical or chronicle plays, the
conditions are different, and his imagination submits itself to the
necessary restrictions on its freedom of movement. Outside the tragedies
also, the _Tempest_ makes an exception worthy of notice. If I read it
rightly, it is an example of how a great poet should write allegory,--not
embodying metaphysical abstractions, but giving us ideals abstracted from
life itself, suggesting an under-meaning everywhere, forcing it upon us
nowhere, tantalizing the mind with hints that imply so much and tell so
little, and yet keep the attention all eye and ear with eager, if
fruitless, expectation. Here the leading characters are not merely
typical, but symbolical,--that is, they do not illustrate a class of
persons, they belong to universal Nature. Consider the scene of the play.
Shakespeare is wont to take some familiar story, to lay his scene in some
place the name of which, at least, is familiar,--well knowing the reserve
of power that lies in the familiar as a background, when things are set
in front of it under a new and unexpected light. But in the _Tempest_ the
scene is laid nowhere, or certainly in no country laid down on any map.
Nowhere, then? At once nowhere and anywhere,--for it is in the soul of
man, that still vexed island hung between the upper and the nether world,
and liable to incursions from both. There is scarce a play of
Shakespeare's in which there is such variety of character, none in which
character has so little to do in the carrying on and development of the
story. But consider for a moment if ever the Imagination has been so
embodied as in Prospero, the Fancy as in Ariel, the brute Understanding
as in Caliban, who, the moment his poor wits are warmed with the glorious
liquor of Stephano, plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher
Reason. Miranda is mere abstract Womanhood, as truly so before she sees
Ferdinand as Eve before she was wakened to consciousness by the echo of
her own nature coming back to her, the same, and yet not the same, from
that of Adam. Ferdinand, again, is nothing more than Youth, compelled to
drudge at something he despises, till the sacrifice of will and
abnegation of self win him his ideal in Miranda. The subordinate
personages are simply types; Sebastian and Antonio, of weak character and
evil ambition; Gonzalo, of average sense and honesty; Adrian and
Francisco, of the walking gentlemen who serve to fill up a world. They
are not characters in the same sense with Iago, Falstaff, Shallow, or
Leontius; and it is curious how every one of them loses his way in this
enchanted island of life, all the victims of one illusion after another,
except Prospero, whose ministers are purely ideal. The whole play,
indeed, is a succession of illusions, winding up with those solemn words
of the great enchanter who had summoned to his service every shape of
merriment or passion, every figure in the great tragi-comedy of life, and
who was now bidding farewell to the scene of his triumphs. For in
Prospero shall we not recognize the Artist himself,--

"That did not better for his life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds,
Whence comes it that his name receives a brand,"--

who has forfeited a shining place in the world's eye by devotion to his
art, and who, turned adrift on the ocean of life in the leaky carcass of
a boat, has shipwrecked on that Fortunate Island (as men always do who
find their true vocation) where he is absolute lord, making all the
powers of Nature serve him, but with Ariel and Caliban as special
ministers? Of whom else could he have been thinking, when he says,--

"Graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,
By my so potent art"?

Was this man, so extraordinary from whatever side we look at him, who ran
so easily through the whole scale of human sentiment, from the homely
commonsense of, "When two men ride of one horse, one _must_ ride behind,"
to the transcendental subtilty of,

"No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change;
Thy pyramids, built up with newer might,
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight,"--

was he alone so unconscious of powers, some part of whose magic is
recognized by all mankind, from the school-boy to the philosopher, that
he merely sat by and saw them go without the least notion what they were
about? Was he an inspired idiot, _votre bizarre Shakespeare_? a vast,
irregular genius? a simple rustic, warbling his _native_ wood-notes wild,
in other words, insensible to the benefits of culture? When attempts have
been made at various times to prove that this singular and seemingly
contradictory creature, not one, but all mankind's epitome, was a
musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a Catholic, a Protestant, an atheist, an
Irishman, a discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and finally, that
he was not himself, but somebody else, is it not a little odd that the
last thing anybody should have thought of proving him was an artist?
Nobody believes any longer that immediate inspiration is possible in
modern times (as if God had grown old),--at least, nobody believes it of
the prophets of those days, of John of Leyden, or Reeves, or
Muggleton,--and yet everybody seems to take it for granted of this one
man Shakespeare. He, somehow or other, without knowing it, was able to do
what none of the rest of them, though knowing it all too perfectly well,
could begin to do. Everybody seems to get afraid of him in turn. Voltaire
plays gentleman usher for him to his countrymen, and then, perceiving
that his countrymen find a flavor in him beyond that of _Zaire_ or
_Mahomet_, discovers him to be a _Sauvage ivre, sans le moindre etincelle
de bon gout, et sans le moindre connoissance des regles_. Goethe, who
tells us that _Goetz von Berlichingen_ was written in the Shakespearian
manner,--and we certainly should not have guessed it, if he had not
blabbed,--comes to the final conclusion, that Shakespeare was a poet, but
not a dramatist. Chateaubriand thinks that he has corrupted art. "If, to
attain," he says, "the height of tragic art, it be enough to heap
together disparate scenes without order and without connection, to
dovetail the burlesque with the pathetic, to set the water-carrier beside
the monarch and the huckster-wench beside the queen, who may not
reasonably flatter himself with being the rival of the greatest masters?
Whoever should give himself the trouble to retrace a single one of his
days, ... to keep a journal from hour to hour, would have made a drama in
the fashion of the English poet." But there are journals and journals, as
the French say, and what goes into them depends on the eye that gathers
for them. It is a long step from St. Simon to Dangeau, from Pepys to
Thoresby, from Shakespeare even to the Marquis de Chateaubriand. M. Hugo
alone, convinced that, as founder of the French Romantic School, there is
a kind of family likeness between himself and Shakespeare, stands boldly
forth to prove the father as extravagant as the son. Calm yourself, M.
Hugo, you are no more a child of his than Will Davenant was! But, after
all, is it such a great crime to produce something absolutely new in a
world so tedious as ours, and so apt to tell its old stories over again?
I do not mean new in substance, but in the manner of presentation. Surely
the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety,
freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar. He invents
nothing, but seems rather to _re_-discover the world about him, and his
penetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of the
strangeness of new creation. Meanwhile the changed conditions of modern
life demand a change in the method of treatment. The ideal is not a
strait-waistcoat. Because _Alexis and Dora_ is so charming, shall we have
no _Paul and Virginia?_ It was the idle endeavor to reproduce the old
enchantment in the old way that gave us the pastoral, sent to the garret
now with our grandmothers' achievements of the same sort in worsted.
Every age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, "Tell me what
I am like"; and he who succeeds in catching the evanescent expression
that reveals character--which is as much as to say, what is intrinsically
human--will be found to have caught something as imperishable as human
nature itself. Aristophanes, by the vital and essential qualities of his
humorous satire, is already more nearly our contemporary than Moliere;
and even the _Trouveres_, careless and trivial as they mostly are, could
fecundate a great poet like Chaucer, and are still delightful reading.

The Attic tragedy still keeps its hold upon the loyalty of scholars
through their imagination, or their pedantry, or their feeling of an
exclusive property, as may happen, and, however alloyed with baser
matter, this loyalty is legitimate and well bestowed. But the dominion of
the Shakespearian is even wider. It pushes forward its boundaries from
year to year, and moves no landmark backward. Here Alfieri and Leasing
own a common allegiance; and the loyalty to him is one not of guild or
tradition, but of conviction and enthusiasm. Can this be said of any
other modern? of robust Corneille? of tender Racine? of Calderon even,
with his tropical warmth and vigor of production? The Greeks and he are
alike and alone in this, and for the same reason, that both are
unapproachably the highest in their kind. Call him Gothic, if you like,
but the inspiring mind that presided over the growth of these clustered
masses of arch and spire and pinnacle and buttress is neither Greek nor
Gothic,--it is simply genius lending itself to embody the new desire of
man's mind, as it had embodied the old. After all, to be delightful is to
be classic, and the chaotic never pleases long. But manifoldness is not
confusion, any more than formalism is simplicity. If Shakespeare rejected
the unities, as I think he who complains of "Art made tongue-tied by
Authority" might very well deliberately do, it was for the sake of an
imaginative unity more intimate than any of time and place. The antique
in itself is not the ideal, though its remoteness from the vulgarity of
everyday associations helps to make it seem so. The true ideal is not
opposed to the real, nor is it any artificial heightening thereof, but
lies _in_ it, and blessed are the eyes that find it! It is the _mens
divinior_ which hides within the actual, transfiguring matter-of-fact
into matter-of-meaning for him who has the gift of second-sight. In this
sense Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, Shakespeare often
more truly so than the Greeks. I think it is a more or less conscious
perception of this ideality, as it is a more or less well-grounded
persuasion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to him, as to them,
and with equal justice, a permanent supremacy over the minds of men. This
gives to his characters their universality, to his thought its
irradiating property, while the artistic purpose running through and
combining the endless variety of scene and character will alone account
for his power of dramatic effect. Goethe affirmed, that, without
Schroeder's prunings and adaptations, Shakespeare was too undramatic for
the German theatre,--that, if the theory that his plays should be
represented textually should prevail, he would be driven from the boards.
The theory has prevailed, and he not only holds his own, but is acted
oftener than ever. It is not irregular genius that can do this, for
surely Germany need not go abroad for what her own Werners could more
than amply supply her with.

But I would much rather quote a fine saying than a bad prophecy of a man
to whom I owe so much. Goethe, in one of the most perfect of his shorter
poems, tells us that a poem is like a painted window. Seen from without,
(and he accordingly justifies the Philistine, who never looks at them
otherwise,) they seem dingy and confused enough; but enter, and then

"Da ist's auf einmal farbig helle,
Geschicht' und Zierath glaenzt in Schnelle."

With the same feeling he says elsewhere in prose, that "there is a
destructive criticism and a productive. The former is very easy; for one
has only to set up in his mind any standard, any model, however narrow"
(let us say the Greeks), "and then boldly assert that the work under
review does not match with it, and therefore is good for nothing,--the
matter is settled, and one must at once deny its claim. Productive
criticism is a great deal more difficult; it asks, What did the author
propose to himself? Is what he proposes reasonable and comprehensible?
and how far has he succeeded in carrying it out?" It is in applying this
latter kind of criticism to Shakespeare that the Germans have set us an
example worthy of all commendation. If they have been sometimes
over-subtile, they at least had the merit of first looking at his works
as wholes, as something that very likely contained an idea, perhaps
conveyed a moral, if we could get at it. The illumination lent us by most
of the English commentators reminds us of the candles which guides hold
up to show us a picture in a dark place, the smoke of which gradually
makes the work of the artist invisible under its repeated layers.
Lessing, as might have been expected, opened the first glimpse in the new
direction; Goethe followed with his famous exposition of Hamlet; A.W.
Schlegel took a more comprehensive view in his Lectures, which Coleridge
worked over into English, adding many fine criticisms of his own on
single passages; and finally, Gervinus has devoted four volumes to a
comment on the plays, full of excellent matter, though pushing the moral
exegesis beyond all reasonable bounds.[133] With the help of all these,
and especially of the last, I shall apply this theory of criticism to
Hamlet, not in the hope of saying anything new, but of bringing something
to the support of the thesis, that, if Shakespeare was skilful as a
playwright, he was even greater as a dramatist,--that, if his immediate
business was to fill the theatre, his higher object was to create
something which, by fulfilling the conditions and answering the
requirements of modern life, should as truly deserve to be called a
work of art as others had deserved it by doing the same thing in
former times and under other circumstances. Supposing him to have
accepted--consciously or not is of little importance--the new terms of
the problem which makes character the pivot of dramatic action, and
consequently the key of dramatic unity, how far did he succeed?

Before attempting my analysis, I must clear away a little rubbish. Are
such anachronisms as those of which Voltaire accuses Shakespeare in
Hamlet, such as the introduction of cannon before the invention of
gunpowder, and making Christians of the Danes three centuries too soon,
of the least bearing aesthetically? I think not; but as they are of a
piece with a great many other criticisms upon the great poet, it is worth
while to dwell upon them a moment.

The first demand we make upon whatever claims to be a work of art (and we
have a right to make it) is that it shall be _in keeping_. Now this
propriety is of two kinds, either extrinsic or intrinsic. In the first I
should class whatever relates rather to the body than the soul of the
work, such as fidelity to the facts of history, (wherever that is
important,) congruity of costume, and the like,--in short, whatever might
come under the head of _picturesque_ truth, a departure from which would
shock too rudely our preconceived associations. I have seen an Indian
chief in French boots, and he seemed to me almost tragic; but, put upon
the stage in tragedy, he would have been ludicrous. Lichtenberg, writing
from London in 1775, tells us that Garrick played Hamlet in a suit of the
French fashion, then commonly worn, and that he was blamed for it by some
of the critics; but, he says, one hears no such criticism during the
play, nor on the way home, nor at supper afterwards, nor indeed till the
emotion roused by the great actor has had time to subside. He justifies
Garrick, though we should not be able to endure it now. Yet nothing would
be gained by trying to make Hamlet's costume true to the assumed period
of the play, for the scene of it is laid in a Denmark that has no dates.

In the second and more important category, I should put, first,
co-ordination of character, that is, a certain variety in harmony of the
personages of a drama, as in the attitudes and coloring of the figures in
a pictorial composition, so that, while mutually relieving and setting
off each other, they shall combine in the total impression; second, that
subordinate truth to Nature which makes each character coherent in
itself; and, third, such propriety of costume and the like as shall
satisfy the superhistoric sense, to which, and to which alone, the higher
drama appeals. All these come within the scope of _imaginative_ truth. To
illustrate my third head by an example. Tieck criticises John Kemble's
dressing for Macbeth in a modern Highland costume, as being ungraceful
without any countervailing merit of historical exactness. I think a
deeper reason for his dissatisfaction might be found in the fact, that
this garb, with its purely modern and British army associations, is out
of place on Fores Heath, and drags the Weird Sisters down with it from
their proper imaginative remoteness in the gloom of the past to the
disenchanting glare of the foot-lights. It is not the antiquarian, but
the poetic conscience, that is wounded. To this, exactness, so far as
concerns ideal representation, may not only not be truth, but may even be
opposed to it. Anachronisms and the like are in themselves of no account,
and become important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusion
to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons to the
imagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic, not historic truth. It
is comparatively easy for an author to _get up_ any period with tolerable
minuteness in externals, but readers and audiences find more difficulty
in getting them down, though oblivion swallows scores of them at a gulp.
The saving truth in such matters is a truth to essential and permanent
characteristics. The Ulysses of Shakespeare, like the Ulysses of Dante
and Tennyson, more or less harmonizes with our ideal conception of the
wary, long-considering, though adventurous son of Laertes, yet Simon Lord
Lovat is doubtless nearer the original type. In Hamlet, though there is
no Denmark of the ninth century, Shakespeare has suggested the prevailing
rudeness of manners quite enough for his purpose. We see it in the single
combat of Hamlet's father with the elder Fortinbras, in the vulgar
wassail of the king, in the English monarch being expected to hang
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern out of hand merely to oblige his cousin of
Denmark, in Laertes, sent to Paris to be made a gentleman of, becoming
instantly capable of any the most barbarous treachery to glut his
vengeance. We cannot fancy Ragnar Lodbrog or Eric the Red matriculating
at Wittenberg, but it was essential that Hamlet should be a scholar, and
Shakespeare sends him thither without more ado. All through the play we
get the notion of a state of society in which a savage nature has
disguised itself in the externals of civilization, like a Maori deacon,
who has only to strip and he becomes once more a tattooed pagan with his
mouth watering for a spare-rib of his pastor. Historically, at the date
of Hamlet, the Danes were in the habit of burning their enemies alive in
their houses, with as much of their family about them as might be to make
it comfortable. Shakespeare seems purposely to have dissociated his play
from history by changing nearly every name in the original legend. The
motive of the play--revenge as a religious duty--belongs only to a social
state in which the traditions of barbarism are still operative, but, with
infallible artistic judgment, Shakespeare has chosen, not untamed Nature,
as he found it in history, but the period of transition, a period in
which the times are always out of joint, and thus the irresolution which
has its root in Hamlet's own character is stimulated by the very
incompatibility of that legacy of vengeance he has inherited from the
past with the new culture and refinement of which he is the
representative. One of the few books which Shakespeare is known to have
possessed was Florio's Montaigne, and he might well have transferred the
Frenchman's motto, _Que scais je_? to the front of his tragedy; nor can I
help fancying something more than accident in the fact that Hamlet has
been a student at Wittenberg, whence those new ideas went forth, of whose
results in unsettling men's faith, and consequently disqualifying them
for promptness in action, Shakespeare had been not only an eye-witness,
but which he must actually have experienced in himself.

One other objection let me touch upon here, especially as it has been
urged against Hamlet, and that is the introduction of low characters and
comic scenes in tragedy. Even Garrick, who had just assisted at the
Stratford Jubilee, where Shakespeare had been pronounced divine, was
induced by this absurd outcry for the proprieties of the tragic stage to
omit the grave-diggers' scene from Hamlet. Leaving apart the fact that
Shakespeare would not have been the representative poet he is, if he had
not given expression to this striking tendency of the Northern races,
which shows itself constantly, not only in their literature, but even in
their mythology and their architecture, the grave-diggers' scene always
impresses me as one of the most pathetic in the whole tragedy. That
Shakespeare introduced such scenes and characters with deliberate
intention, and with a view to artistic relief and contrast, there can
hardly be a doubt. We must take it for granted that a man whose works
show everywhere the results of judgment sometimes acted with forethought.
I find the springs of the profoundest sorrow and pity in this hardened
indifference of the grave-diggers, in their careless discussion as to
whether Ophelia's death was by suicide or no, in their singing and
jesting at their dreary work.

"A pickaxe and a spade, a spade,
For--and a shrouding-sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet!"

_We_ know who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality,--how much
beauty, love, and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. All
we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force, and we recoil
from our amusement at the ghastly drollery of the two delvers with a
shock of horror. That the unconscious Hamlet should stumble on _this_
grave of all others, that it should be _here_ that he should pause to
muse humorously on death and decay,--all this prepares us for the
revulsion of passion in the next scene, and for the frantic confession,--

"I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not with all _their_ quantity of love
Make up my sum!"

And it is only here that such an asseveration would be true even to the
feeling of the moment; for it is plain from all we know of Hamlet that he
could not so have loved Ophelia, that he was incapable of the
self-abandonment of a true passion, that he would have analyzed this
emotion as he does all others, would have peeped and botanized upon it
till it became to him a mere matter of scientific interest. All this
force of contrast, and this horror of surprise, were necessary so to
intensify his remorseful regret that he should believe himself for once
in earnest. The speech of the King, "O, he is mad, Laertes," recalls him
to himself, and he at once begins to rave:--

"Zounds! show me what thou'lt do!
Woul't weep? woul't fight? woul't fast? woul't tear thyself?
Woul't drink up eysil? eat a crocodile?"

It is easy to see that the whole plot hinges upon the character of
Hamlet, that Shakespeare's conception of this was the ovum out of which
the whole organism was hatched. And here let me remark, that there is a
kind of genealogical necessity in the character,--a thing not altogether
strange to the attentive reader of Shakespeare. Hamlet seems the natural
result of the mixture of father and mother in his temperament, the
resolution and persistence of the one, like sound timber wormholed and
made shaky, as it were, by the other's infirmity of will and
discontinuity of purpose. In natures so imperfectly mixed it is not
uncommon to find vehemence of intention the prelude and counterpoise of
weak performance, the conscious nature striving to keep up its
self-respect by a triumph in words all the more resolute that it feels
assured beforehand of inevitable defeat in action. As in such slipshod
housekeeping men are their own largest creditors, they find it easy to
stave off utter bankruptcy of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise
with another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling
becomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge
discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as the
figures lengthened on the paper! As with Hamlet, so it is with Ophelia
and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again in the wasting
heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the daughter, while the son shows it in a
rashness of impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential
feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so
steady on its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio,--the
foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural,
also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should have her
softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy; for there are two kinds of
weakness, that which breaks, and that which bends. Ophelia's is of the
former kind; Hero is her counterpart, giving way before calamity, and
rising again so soon as the pressure is removed.

I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest possible
definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's mind which justifies the
tragic turn of the play, and renders it natural and unavoidable from the
beginning. The first is from the second canto of the _Inferno_:--

"E quale e quei che disvuol cio che volle,
E per nuovi pensier sangia proposta,
Si che del cominciar tutto si tolle;
Tal mi fec' io in quella oscura costa;
Perche pensando consumai la impresa
Che fu nel cominciar cotanto tosta."

"And like the man who unwills what he willed,
And for new thoughts doth change his first intent,
So that he cannot anywhere begin,
Such became I upon that slope obscure,
Because with thinking I consumed resolve,
That was so ready at the setting out."

Again, in the fifth of the _Purgatorio_:--

"Che sempre l' uomo in cui pensier rampoglia
Sovra pensier, da se dilunga il segno,
Perche la foga l' un dell' altro insolla."

"For always he in whom one thought buds forth
Out of another farther puts the goal.
For each has only force to mar the other."

Dante was a profound metaphysician, and as in the first passage he
describes and defines a certain quality of mind, so in the other he tells
us its result in the character and life, namely, indecision and
failure,--the goal _farther_ off at the end than at the beginning. It is
remarkable how close a resemblance of thought, and even of expression,
there is between the former of these quotations and a part of Hamlet's
famous soliloquy:--

"Thus conscience [i.e. consciousness] doth make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action!"

It is an inherent peculiarity of a mind like Hamlet's that it should be
conscious of its own defect. Men of his type are forever analyzing their
own emotions and motives. They cannot do anything, because they always
see two ways of doing it. They cannot determine on any course of action,
because they are always, as it were, standing at the cross-roads, and see
too well the disadvantages of every one of them. It is not that they are
incapable of resolve, but somehow the band between the motive power and
the operative faculties is relaxed and loose. The engine works, but the
machinery it should drive stands still. The imagination is so much in
overplus, that thinking a thing becomes better than doing it, and thought
with its easy perfection, capable of everything because it can accomplish
everything with ideal means, is vastly more attractive and satisfactory
than deed, which must be wrought at best with imperfect instruments, and
always falls short of the conception that went before it. "If to do,"
says Portia in the _Merchant of Venice_,--"if to do were as easy as to
know what 't were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." Hamlet knows only too well what 't were good
to do, but he palters with everything in a double sense: he sees the
grain of good there is in evil, and the grain of evil there is in good,
as they exist in the world, and, finding that he can make those
feather-weighted accidents balance each other, infers that there is
little to choose between the essences themselves. He is of Montaigne's
mind, and says expressly that "there is nothing good or ill, but thinking
makes it so." He dwells so exclusively in the world of ideas that the
world of facts seems trifling, nothing is worth the while; and he has
been so long objectless and purposeless, so far as actual life is
concerned, that, when at last an object and an aim are forced upon him,
he cannot deal with them, and gropes about vainly for a motive outside of
himself that shall marshal his thoughts for him and guide his faculties
into the path of action. He is the victim not so much of feebleness of
will as of an intellectual indifference that hinders the will from
working long in any one direction. He wishes to will, but never wills.
His continual iteration of resolve shows that he has no resolution. He is
capable of passionate energy where the occasion presents itself suddenly
from without, because nothing is so irritable as conscious irresolution
with a duty to perform. But of deliberate energy he is not capable; for
there the impulse must come from within, and the blade of his analysis is
so subtile that it can divide the finest hair of motive 'twixt north and
northwest side, leaving him desperate to choose between them. The very
consciousness of his defect is an insuperable bar to his repairing it;
for the unity of purpose, which infuses every fibre of the character with
will available whenever wanted, is impossible where the mind can never
rest till it has resolved that unity into its component elements, and
satisfied itself which on the whole is of greater value. A critical
instinct so insatiable that it must turn upon itself, for lack of
something else to hew and hack, becomes incapable at last of originating
anything except indecision. It becomes infallible in what _not_ to do.
How easily he might have accomplished his task is shown by the conduct of
Laertes. When _he_ has a death to avenge, he raises a mob, breaks into
the palace, bullies the king, and proves how weak the usurper really was.

The world is the victim of splendid parts, and is slow to accept a
rounded whole, because that is something which is long in completing,
still longer in demonstrating its completion. We like to be surprised
into admiration, and not logically convinced that we ought to admire. We
are willing to be delighted with success, though we are somewhat
indifferent to the homely qualities which insure it. Our thought is so
filled with the rocket's burst of momentary splendor so far above us,
that we forget the poor stick, useful and unseen, that made its climbing
possible. One of these homely qualities is continuity of character, and
it escapes present applause because it tells chiefly, in the long run, in
results. With his usual tact, Shakespeare has brought in such a character
as a contrast and foil to Hamlet. Horatio is the only complete _man_ in
the play,--solid, well-knit, and true; a noble, quiet nature, with that
highest of all qualities, judgment, always sane and prompt; who never
drags his anchors for any wind of opinion or fortune, but grips all the
closer to the reality of things. He seems one of those calm,
undemonstrative men whom we love and admire without asking to know why,
crediting them with the capacity of great things, without any test of
actual achievement, because we feel that their manhood is a constant
quality, and no mere accident of circumstance and opportunity. Such men
are always sure of the presence of their highest self on demand. Hamlet
is continually drawing bills on the future, secured by his promise of
himself to himself, which he can never redeem. His own somewhat feminine
nature recognizes its complement in Horatio, and clings to it
instinctively, as naturally as Horatio is attracted by that fatal gift of
imagination, the absence of which makes the strength of his own
character, as its overplus does the weakness of Hamlet's. It is a happy
marriage of two minds drawn together by the charm of unlikeness. Hamlet
feels in Horatio the solid steadiness which he misses in himself; Horatio
in Hamlet that need of service and sustainment to render which gives him
a consciousness of his own value. Hamlet fills the place of a woman to
Horatio, revealing him to himself not only in what he says, but by a
constant claim upon his strength of nature; and there is great
psychological truth in making suicide the first impulse of this quiet,
undemonstrative man, after Hamlet's death, as if the very reason for his
being were taken away with his friend's need of him. In his grief, he for
the first and only time speaks of himself, is first made conscious of
himself by his loss. If this manly reserve of Horatio be true to Nature,
not less so are the communicativeness of Hamlet, and his tendency to
soliloquize. If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just as
truly the happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself,
he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord a
little, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or to profit
by it if he could.

We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he "was not a pipe for
Fortune's finger to play what stop she please," till Hamlet told him so.
That was Fortune's affair, not his; let her try it, if she liked. He is
unconscious of his own peculiar qualities, as men of decision commonly
are, or they would not be men of decision. When there is a thing to be
done, they go straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for them
in the whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on the
other hand, is always studying himself. This world and the other, too,
are always present to his mind, and there in the corner is the little
black kobold of a doubt making mouths at him. He breaks down the bridges
before him, not behind him, as a man of action would do; but there is
something more than this. He is an ingrained sceptic; though his is the
scepticism, not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in
himself. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of the
mind. We might call him insincere: not that he was in any sense a
hypocrite, but only that he never was and never could be in earnest.
Never could be, because no man without intense faith in something ever
can. Even if he only believed in himself, that were better than nothing;
for it will carry a man a great way in the outward successes of life,
nay, will even sometimes give him the Archimedean fulcrum for moving the
world. But Hamlet doubts everything. He doubts the immortality of the
soul, just after seeing his father's spirit, and hearing from its mouth
the secrets of the other world. He doubts Horatio even, and swears him to
secrecy on the cross of his sword, though probably he himself has no
assured belief in the sacredness of the symbol. He doubts Ophelia, and
asks her, "Are you honest?" He doubts the ghost, after he has had a
little time to think about it, and so gets up the play to test the guilt
of the king. And how coherent the whole character is! With what perfect
tact and judgment Shakespeare, in the advice to the players, makes him an
exquisite critic! For just here that part of his character which would be
weak in dealing with affairs is strong. A wise scepticism is the first
attribute of a good critic. He must not believe that the fire-insurance
offices will raise their rates of premium on Charles River, because the
new volume of poems is printing at Riverside or the University Press. He
must not believe so profoundly in the ancients as to think it wholly out
of the question that the world has still vigor enough in its loins to
beget some one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any of
them.

Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his perpetual inclination
to irony. I think this has been generally passed over too lightly, as if
it were something external and accidental, rather assumed as a mask than
part of the real nature of the man. It seems to me to go deeper, to be
something innate, and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the grave
irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly in
earnest,--the _boomerang_ of argument, which one throws in the opposite
direction of what he means to hit, and which seems to be flying away from
the adversary, who will presently find himself knocked down by it. It is
not like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a
clear mind twisting awry whatever enters it,--or of Iago, which is the
slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty and
goodness to taint them with distrust: it is the half-jest, half-earnest
of an inactive temperament that has not quite made up its mind whether
life is a reality or no, whether men were not made in jest, and which
amuses itself equally with finding a deep meaning in trivial things and a
trifling one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of
earnestness in its own essence infects everything else with its own
indifference. If there be now and then an unmannerly rudeness and
bitterness in it, as in the scenes with Polonius and Osrick, we must
remember that Hamlet was just in the condition which spurs men to sallies
of this kind: dissatisfied, at one neither with the world nor with
himself, and accordingly casting about for something out of himself to
vent his spleen upon. But even in these passages there is no hint of
earnestness, of any purpose beyond the moment; they are mere cat's-paws
of vexation, and not the deep-raking ground-swell of passion, as we see
it in the sarcasm of Lear.

The question of Hamlet's madness has been much discussed and variously
decided. High medical authority has pronounced, as usual, on both sides
of the question. But the induction has been drawn from too narrow
premises, being based on a mere diagnosis of the _case_, and not on an
appreciation of the character in its completeness. We have a case of
pretended madness in the Edgar of _King Lear_; and it is certainly true
that that is a charcoal sketch, coarsely outlined, compared with the
delicate drawing, the lights, shades, and half-tints of the portraiture
in Hamlet. But does this tend to prove that the madness of the latter,
because truer to the recorded observation of experts, is real, and meant
to be real, as the other to be fictitious? Not in the least, as it
appears to me. Hamlet, among all the characters of Shakespeare, is the
most eminently a metaphysician and psychologist. He is a close observer,
continually analyzing his own nature and that of others, letting fall his
little drops of acid irony on all who come near him, to make them show
what they are made of. Even Ophelia is not too sacred, Osrick not too
contemptible for experiment. If such a man assumed madness, he would play
his part perfectly. If Shakespeare himself, without going mad, could so
observe and remember all the abnormal symptoms as to be able to reproduce
them in Hamlet, why should it be beyond the power of Hamlet to reproduce
them in himself? If you deprive Hamlet of reason, there is no truly
tragic motive left. He would be a fit subject for Bedlam, but not for the
stage. We might have pathology enough, but no pathos. Ajax first becomes
tragic when he recovers his wits. If Hamlet is irresponsible, the whole
play is a chaos. That he is not so might be proved by evidence enough,
were it not labor thrown away.

This feigned madness of Hamlet's is one of the few points in which
Shakespeare has kept close to the old story on which he founded his play;
and as he never decided without deliberation, so he never acted without
unerring judgment, Hamlet _drifts_ through the whole tragedy. He never
keeps on one tack long enough to get steerage-way, even if, in a nature
like his, with those electric streamers of whim and fancy forever
wavering across the vault of his brain, the needle of judgment would
point in one direction long enough to strike a course by. The scheme of
simulated insanity is precisely the one he would have been likely to hit
upon, because it enabled him to follow his own bent, and to drift with an
apparent purpose, postponing decisive action by the very means he adopts
to arrive at its accomplishment, and satisfying himself with the show of
doing something that he may escape so much the longer the dreaded
necessity of really doing anything at all. It enables him to _play_ with
life and duty, instead of taking them by the rougher side, where alone
any firm grip is possible,--to feel that he is on the way toward
accomplishing somewhat, when he is really paltering with his own
irresolution. Nothing, I think, could be more finely imagined than this.
Voltaire complains that he goes mad without any sufficient object or
result. Perfectly true, and precisely what was most natural for him to
do, and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare meant that he should do.
It was delightful to him to indulge his imagination and humor, to prove
his capacity for something by playing a part: the one thing he could not
do was to bring himself to _act_, unless when surprised by a sudden
impulse of suspicion,--as where he kills Polonius, and there he could not
see his victim. He discourses admirably of suicide, but does not kill
himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by the chance to kill
the king with the excuse that he will not do it while he is praying, lest
his soul be saved thereby, though it is more than doubtful whether he
believed it himself. He allows himself to be packed off to England,
without any motive except that it would for the time take him farther
from a present duty: the more disagreeable to a nature like his because
it _was_ present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration.
When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn planted in a vase
which it bursts with its growth, and says that in like manner Hamlet is a
nature which breaks down under the weight of a duty too great for it to
bear, he seems to have considered the character too much from one side.
Had Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous commission,
Goethe's conception of him would have been satisfactory enough. But
Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like Werther; on the contrary, he saw
things only too clearly in the dry north-light of the intellect. It is
chance that at last brings him to his end. It would appear rather that
Shakespeare intended to show us an imaginative temperament brought face
to face with actualities, into any clear relation of sympathy with which
it cannot bring itself. The very means that Shakespeare makes use of to
lay upon him the obligation of acting--the ghost--really seems to make it
all the harder for him to act; for the spectre but gives an additional
excitement to his imagination and a fresh topic for his scepticism.

I shall not attempt to evolve any high moral significance from the play,
even if I thought it possible; for that would be aside from the present
purpose. The scope of the higher drama is to represent life, not everyday
life, it is true, but life lifted above the plane of bread-and-butter
associations, by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at once
inspiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passion
condensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the
ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase whose
brief, but terrible, illumination prints the outworn landscape of
every-day upon our brains, with its little motives and mean results, in
lines of tell-tale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us our
own weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more awful results,--to
teach us that what we pardon in our selves as venial faults, if they seem
to have but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as long
as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives,
that they are dry-rotting the very fibre of will and conscience, so that,
if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or a stringent
emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete as that
we shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre. But the primary
_object_ of a tragedy is not to inculcate a formal moral. Representing
life, it teaches, like life, by indirection, by those nods and winks that
are thrown away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be
sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have
kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father's death
to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but Lear may teach us to
draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loose-handed
weakness of giving; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and forever
another, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks
forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that
may not be so dark as blood, but that will not out; Hamlet, that all the
noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the
grasp of an infirm purpose; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some one
weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one
impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic
life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All
this we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware
of all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with
any such didactic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know that
one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,--that,
where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a
thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. He
did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one
hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down souse into
the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult
its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the
hawk-nature as well as the hen-nature; and if he is unequalled in
anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of
reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and
misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist.

Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which the author never
dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern myself to inquire.
Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in their
works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in the brain
as they are built up with deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will,
that which the artist did not mean to put into his work, but which found
itself there by some generous process of Nature of which he was as
unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has somewhat
in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher things than those which
come by plot and observation. Goethe wrote his _Faust_ in its earliest
form without a thought of the deeper meaning which the exposition of an
age of criticism was to find in it: without foremeaning it, he had
impersonated in Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this
subtract from the debt we owe him? Not at all. If originality were
conscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. I
believe that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet not a mere
metaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood: yet it is certainly
curious how prophetically typical the character is of that introversion
of mind which is so constant a phenomenon of these latter days, of that
over-consciousness which wastes itself in analyzing the motives of action
instead of acting.

The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be pyramidal in
form,--a central figure, from which the others slope gradually away on
the two sides. Shakespeare probably had never heard of this rule, and, if
he had, would not have been likely to respect it more than he has the
so-called classical unities of time and place. But he understood
perfectly the artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief.
Taking Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character,
which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that springs
from overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty of temperament in
Ophelia, while, on the other hand, it is brought into fuller relief by
the steady force of Horatio and the impulsive violence of Laertes, who is
resolute from thoughtlessness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplus
of thought.

If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be, that Will is
Fate, and that, Will once abdicating, the inevitable successor in the
regency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted, instead of musing how good it would
be to act, the king might have been the only victim. As it is, all the
main actors in the story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his
irresolution. We see how a single great vice of character at last draws
to itself as allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, as
in civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves upon the
stronger side.

"In Life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscles trained: know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes? or when she'll say to thee,
'I find thee worthy, do this thing for me'?"

I have said that it was doubtful if Shakespeare had any conscious moral
intention in his writings. I meant only that he was purely and primarily
poet. And while he was an English poet in a sense that is true of no
other, his method was thoroughly Greek, yet with this remarkable
difference,--that, while the Greek dramatists took purely national themes
and gave them a universal interest by their mode of treatment, he took
what may be called cosmopolitan traditions, legends of human nature, and
nationalized them by the infusion of his perfectly Anglican breadth of
character and solidity of understanding. Wonderful as his imagination and
fancy are, his perspicacity and artistic discretion are more so. This
country tradesman's son, coming up to London, could set high-bred wits,
like Beaumont, uncopiable lessons in drawing gentlemen such as are seen
nowhere else but on the canvas of Titian; he could take Ulysses away from
Homer and expand the shrewd and crafty islander into a statesman whose
words are the pith of history. But what makes him yet more exceptional
was his utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise of character which
enabled him to be at once the greatest of poets and so unnoticeable a
good citizen as to leave no incidents for biography. His material was
never far-sought; (it is still disputed whether the fullest head of which
we have record were cultivated beyond the range of grammar-school
precedent!) but he used it with a poetic instinct which we cannot
parallel, identified himself with it, yet remained always its born and
questionless master. He finds the Clown and Fool upon the stage,--he
makes them the tools of his pleasantry, his satire, and even his pathos;
he finds a fading rustic superstition, and shapes out of it ideal Pucks,
Titanias, and Ariels, in whose existence statesmen and scholars believe
forever. Always poet, he subjects all to the ends of his art, and gives
in Hamlet the churchyard ghost, but with the cothurnus on,--the messenger
of God's revenge against murder; always philosopher, he traces in Macbeth
the metaphysics of apparitions, painting the shadowy Banquo only on the
o'erwrought brain of the murderer, and staining the hand of his
wife-accomplice (because she was the more refined and higher nature) with
the disgustful blood-spot that is not there. We say he had no moral
intention, for the reason, that, as artist, it was not his to deal with
the realities, but only with the shows of things; yet, with a temperament
so just, an insight so inevitable as his, it was impossible that the
moral reality, which underlies the _mirage_ of the poet's vision, should
not always be suggested. His humor and satire are never of the
destructive kind; what he does in that way is suggestive only,--not
breaking bubbles with Thor's hammer, but puffing them away with the
breath of a Clown, or shivering them with the light laugh of a genial
cynic. Men go about to prove the existence of a God! Was it a bit of
phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing with
them, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows?

But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man,
and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. What has he told us of
himself? In our self-exploiting nineteenth century, with its melancholy
liver-complaint, how serene and high he seems! If he had sorrows, he has
made them the woof of everlasting consolation to his kind; and if, as
poets are wont to whine, the outward world was cold to him, its biting
air did but trace itself in loveliest frost-work of fancy on the many
windows of that self-centred and cheerful soul.




Footnotes:

[119] As where Ben Jonson is able to say,--

"Man may securely sin, but safely never."


[120] "Vulgarem locutionem anpellamus cam qua infantes adsuefiunt ab
adsistentibus cum primitus distinguere voces incipiunt: vel, quod
brevius dici potest, vulgarem locutionem asserimus _quam sine omni
regula, nutricem imitantes accepimus_." Dantes, _de Vulg. Eloquio_,
Lib I. cap. i.


[121] Gray, himself a painful corrector, told Nicholls that "nothing
was done so well as at the first concoction,"--adding, as a reason,
"We think in words." Ben Jonson said, it was a pity Shakespeare had
not blotted more, for that he sometimes wrote nonsense,--and cited in
proof of it the verse,

"Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."

The last four words do not appear in the passage as it now stands,
and Professor Craik suggests that they were stricken out in
consequence of Jonson's criticism. This is very probable; but we
suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master
Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely
admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a
successful _coup d'etat_, the condemnation of which he would fancy
that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he
would therefore be forever indirectly palliating.


[122] We use the word _Latin_ here to express words derived either
mediately or immediately from that language.


[123] The prose of Chaucer (1390) and of Sir Thomas Malory
(translating from the French, 1470) is less Latinized than that of
Bacon, Browne, Taylor, or Milton. The glossary to Spenser's
_Shepherd's Calendar_ (1679) explains words of Teutonic and Romanic
root in about equal proportions. The parallel but independent
development of Scotch is not to be forgotten.


[124] I believe that for the last two centuries the Latin radicals of
English have been more familiar and homelike to those who use them
than the Teutonic. Even so accomplished a person as Professor Crail,
in his _English of Shakespeare_, derives _head_, through the German
_haupt_, from the Latin _caput_! I trust that its genealogy is
nobler, and that it is of kin with _coelum, tueri_, rather than with
the Greek [kephalae], if Suidas be right in tracing the origin of
that to a word meaning _vacuity_. Mr. Craik suggests, also, that
_quick_ and _wicked_ may be etymologically identical, _because_ he
fancies a relationship between _busy_ and the German _boese_, though
_wicked_ is evidently the participial form of A. S. _wacan_, (German
_weichen_,) _to bend, to yield_, meaning _one who has given way to
temptation_, while _quick_ seems as clearly related to _wegan_,
meaning _to move_, a different word, even if radically the same. In
the "London Literary Gazette" for November 13,1858, I find an extract
from Miss Millington's "Heraldry in History, Poetry, and Romance," in
which, speaking of the motto of the Prince of Wales,--_De par Houmaut
ich diene_,--she says; "The precise meaning of the former word
[_Houmout_] has not, I think, been ascertained." The word is plainly
the German _Hochmuth_, and the whole would read, _De par (Aus)
Hochmuth ich diene_,--"Out of magnanimity I serve." So entirely lost
is the Saxon meaning of the word _knave_, (A. S. _cnava_, German
_knabe_,) that the name _navvie_, assumed by railway-laborers, has
been transmogrified into _navigator_. I believe that more people
could tell why the month of July was so called than could explain the
origin of the names for our days of the week, and that it is oftener
the Saxon than the French words in Chaucer that puzzle the modern
reader.


[125] _De Vulgari Eloquio_, Lib. II. cap. i. _ad finem_. I quote this
treatise as Dante's, because the thoughts seem manifestly his; though
I believe that in its present form it is an abridgment by some
transcriber, who sometimes copies textually, and sometimes
substitutes his own language for that of the original.


[126] Vol. III. p. 348, _note_. He grounds his belief, not on the
misprinting of words, but on the misplacing of whole paragraphs. We
were struck with the same thing in the original edition of Chapman's
"Biron's Conspiracy and Tragedy." And yet, in comparing two copies of
this edition, I have found corrections which only the author could
have made. One of the misprints which Mr. Spedding notices affords
both a hint and a warning to the conjectural emendator. In the
edition of "The Advancement of Learning" printed in 1605 occurs the
word _dusinesse_. In a later edition this was conjecturally changed
to _business_; but the occurrence of _vertigine_ in the Latin
translation enables Mr. Spedding to print rightly, _dizziness_.


[127] "At first sight, Shakespeare and his contemporary dramatists
seem to write in styles much alike; nothing so easy as to fall into
that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced
one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakespearian idiom. I
suppose it is because Shakespeare is universal, and, in fact, has no
_manner_."--_Coleridge's Tabletalk_, 214.


[128] Pheidias said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired
thumb, because the modelling-clay yielded to its careless sweep a
grace of curve which it refused to the utmost pains of others.


[129] The best instance I remember is in the _Frogs_, where Bacchus
pleads his inexperience at the oar, and says he is

[Greek: apeiros, athalattotos, asalaminios,]

which might be rendered,

Unskilled, unsea-soned, and un-Salamised.


[130] So Euripides (copied by Theocritus, Id. xxvii.):--

[Greek: Pentheus d' opos mae penthos eisoisei domois] (_Bacchae_,
363.)

[Greek: _Esophronaesen ouk echousa sophronein_]. (_Hippol_., 1037.)

So Calderon: "Y apenas llega, cuando llega a penas."


[131] I have taken the first passage in point that occurred to my
memory. It may not be Shakespeare's, though probably his. The
question of authorship is, I think, settled, so far as criticism can
do it, in Mr. Grant White's admirable essay appended to the Second
Part of Henry VI.


[132] Shakspeare und kein Ende.


[133] I do not mention Ulrici's book, for it seems to me unwieldy and
dull,--zeal without knowledge.




NEW ENGLAND TWO CENTURIES AGO.[134]

The history of New England is written imperishably on the face of a
continent, and in characters as beneficent as they are enduring. In the
Old World national pride feeds itself with the record of battles and
conquests;--battles which proved nothing and settled nothing; conquests
which shifted a boundary on the map, and put one ugly head instead of
another on the coin which the people paid to the tax-gatherer. But
wherever the New-Englander travels among the sturdy commonwealths which
have sprung from the seed of the Mayflower, churches, schools, colleges,
tell him where the men of his race have been, or their influence
penetrated; and an intelligent freedom is the monument of conquests whose
results are not to be measured in square miles. Next to the fugitives
whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little ship-load of outcasts who landed
at Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to influence the
future of the world. The spiritual thirst of mankind has for ages been
quenched at Hebrew fountains; but the embodiment in human institutions of
truths uttered by the Son of man eighteen centuries ago was to be mainly
the work of Puritan thought and Puritan self-devotion. Leave New England
out in the cold! While you are plotting it, she sits by every fireside in
the land where there is piety, culture, and free thought.

Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work,--this is the short formula in
which we may sum up the teaching of the founders of New England, a creed
ample enough for this life and the next. If their municipal regulations
smack somewhat of Judaism, yet there can be no nobler aim or more
practical wisdom than theirs; for it was to make the law of man a living
counterpart of the law of God, in their highest conception of it. Were
they too earnest in the strife to save their souls alive? That is still
the problem which every wise and brave man is lifelong in solving. If the
Devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy
with us as with them; and if we cannot find it in our hearts to break
with a gentleman of so much worldly wisdom, who gives such admirable
dinners, and whose manners are so perfect, so much the worse for us.

Looked at on the outside, New England history is dry and unpicturesque.
There is no rustle of silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of golden
spurs. Our sympathies are not awakened by the changeful destinies, the
rise and fall, of great families, whose doom was in their blood. Instead
of all this, we have the homespun fates of Cephas and Prudence repeated
in an infinite series of peaceable sameness, and finding space enough for
record in the family Bible; we have the noise of axe and hammer and saw,
an apotheosis of dogged work, where, reversing the fairy-tale, nothing is
left to luck, and, if there be any poetry, it is something that cannot be
helped,--the waste of the water over the dam. Extrinsically, it is
prosaic and plebeian; intrinsically, it is poetic and noble; for it is,
perhaps, the most perfect incarnation of an idea the world has ever seen.
That idea was not to found a democracy, nor to charter the city of New
Jerusalem by an act of the General Court, as gentlemen seem to think
whose notions of history and human nature rise like an exhalation from
the good things at a Pilgrim Society dinner. Not in the least. They had
no faith in the Divine institution of a system which gives Teague,
because he can dig, as much influence as Ralph, because he can think, nor
in personal at the expense of general freedom. Their view of human rights
was not so limited that it could not take in human relations and duties
also. They would have been likely to answer the claim, "I am as good as
anybody," by a quiet "Yes, for some things, but not for others; as good,
doubtless, in your place, where all things are good." What the early
settlers of Massachusetts _did_ intend, and what they accomplished, was
the founding here of a _new_ England, and a better one, where the
political superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to
take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles,
either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignorance
as the seed-plot of vice and unreason; but an elective magistracy and
clergy, land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, will ye
nill ye, instead. Here at last, it would seem, simple manhood is to have
a chance to play his stake against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged by
those three hoary sharpers, Prerogative, Patricianism, and Priestcraft.
Whoever has looked into the pamphlets published in England during the
Great Rebellion cannot but have been struck by the fact, that the
principles and practice of the Puritan Colony had begun to react with
considerable force on the mother country; and the policy of the
retrograde party there, after the Restoration, in its dealings with New
England, finds a curious parallel as to its motives (time will show
whether as to its results) in the conduct of the same party towards
America during the last four years.[135] This influence and this fear
alike bear witness to the energy of the principles at work here.

We have said that the details of New England history were essentially dry
and unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist
of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give characters
and events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps never
wrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during the
first forty years after the settlement. But mere work is unpicturesque,
and void of sentiment. Irving instinctively divined and admirably
illustrated in his "Knickerbocker" the humorous element which lies in
this nearness of view, this clear, prosaic daylight of modernness, and
this poverty of stage properties, which makes the actors and the deeds
they were concerned in seem ludicrously small when contrasted with the
semi-mythic grandeur in which we have clothed them, as we look backward
from the crowned result, and fancy a cause as majestic as our conception
of the effect. There was, indeed, one poetic side to the existence
otherwise so narrow and practical; and to have conceived this, however
partially, is the one original and American thing in Cooper. This diviner
glimpse illumines the lives of our Daniel Boones, the man of civilization
and old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes,--confronted,
too, for the first time, with his real self, and so led gradually to
disentangle the original substance of his manhood from the artificial
results of culture. Here was our new Adam of the wilderness, forced to
name anew, not the visible creation of God, but the invisible creation of
man, in those forms that lie at the base of social institutions, so
insensibly moulding personal character and controlling individual action.
Here is the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that
of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as
romantic in its relation to our homespun and plebeian mythus as Arthur in
his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry. We do not mean, of
course, that Cooper's "Leatherstocking" is all this or anything like it,
but that the character typified in him is ideally and potentially all
this and more.

But whatever was poetical in the lives of the early New-Englanders had
something shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was
out of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical that they showed
their true quality, as Englishmen are wont. It has been the fashion
lately with a few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New England
Puritans, as if they were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-minded
fanatics. But all the charges brought against these large-minded and
far-seeing men are precisely those which a really able fanatic, Joseph de
Maistre, lays at the door of Protestantism. Neither a knowledge of human
nature nor of history justifies us in confounding, as is commonly done,
the Puritans of Old and New England, or the English Puritans of the third
with those of the fifth decade of the seventeenth century. Fanaticism,
or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and
active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it
becomes conservatism, whether it will or no. A sceptre once put in the
hand, the grip is instinctive; and he who is firmly seated in authority
soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of
statecraft. From the summit of power men no longer turn their eyes
upward, but begin to look about them. Aspiration sees only one side of
every question; possession, many. And the English Puritans, after their
revolution was accomplished, stood in even a more precarious position
than most successful assailants of the prerogative of whatever _is_ to
continue in being. They had carried a political end by means of a
religious revival. The fulcrum on which they rested their lever to
overturn the existing order of things (as history always placidly calls
the particular forms of _dis_order for the time being) was in the soul of
man. They could not renew the fiery gush of enthusiasm, when once the
molten metal had begun to stiffen in the mould of policy and precedent.
The religious element of Puritanism became insensibly merged in the
political; and, its one great man taken away, it died, as passions have
done before, of possession. It was one thing to shout with Cromwell
before the battle of Dunbar, "Now, Lord, arise, and let thine enemies be
scattered!" and to snuffle, "Rise, Lord, and keep us safe in our
benefices, our sequestered estates, and our five per cent!" Puritanism
meant something when Captain Hodgson, riding out to battle through the
morning mist, turns over the command of his troop to a lieutenant, and
stays to hear the prayer of a cornet, there was "so much of God in it."
Become traditional, repeating the phrase without the spirit, reading the
present backward as if it were written in Hebrew, translating Jehovah by
"I was" instead of "I am,"--it was no more like its former self than the
hollow drum made of Zisca's skin was like the grim captain whose soul it
had once contained. Yet the change was inevitable, for it is not safe to
confound the things of Caesar with the things of God. Some honest
republicans, like Ludlow, were never able to comprehend the chilling
contrast between the ideal aim and the material fulfilment, and looked
askance on the strenuous reign of Oliver,--that rugged boulder of
primitive manhood lying lonely there on the dead level of the
century,--as if some crooked changeling had been laid in the cradle
instead of that fair babe of the Commonwealth they had dreamed. Truly
there is a tide in the affairs of men, but there is no gulf-stream
setting forever in one direction; and those waves of enthusiasm on whose
crumbling crests we sometimes see nations lifted for a gleaming moment
are wont to have a gloomy trough before and behind.

But the founders of New England, though they must have sympathized
vividly with the struggles and triumphs of their brethren in the mother
country, were never subjected to the same trials and temptations, never
hampered with the same lumber of usages and tradition. They were not
driven to win power by doubtful and desperate ways, nor to maintain it by
any compromises of the ends which make it worth having. From the outset
they were builders, without need of first pulling down, whether to make
room or to provide material. For thirty years after the colonization of
the Bay, they had absolute power to mould as they would the character of
their adolescent commonwealth. During this time a whole generation would
have grown to manhood who knew the Old World only by report, in whose
habitual thought kings, nobles, and bishops would be as far away from all
present and practical concern as the figures in a fairy-tale, and all
whose memories and associations, all their unconscious training by eye
and ear, were New English wholly. Nor were the men whose influence was
greatest in shaping the framework and the policy of the Colony, in any
true sense of the word, fanatics. Enthusiasts, perhaps, they were, but
with then the fermentation had never gone further than the ripeness of
the vinous stage. Disappointment had never made it acetous, nor had it
ever putrefied into the turbid zeal of Fifth Monarchism and sectarian
whimsey. There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its
keel, and saving it from all risk of _crankiness_, than business. And
they were business men, men of facts and figures no less than of
religious earnestness. The sum of two hundred thousand pounds had been
invested in their undertaking,--a sum, for that time, truly enormous as
the result of private combination for a doubtful experiment. That their
enterprise might succeed, they must show a balance on the right side of
the countinghouse ledger, as well as in their private accounts with their
own souls. The liberty of praying when and how they would, must be
balanced with an ability of paying when and as they ought. Nor is the
resulting fact in this case at variance with the _a priori_ theory. They
succeeded in making their thought the life and soul of a body politic,
still powerful, still benignly operative, after two centuries; a thing
which no mere fanatic ever did or ever will accomplish. Sober, earnest,
and thoughtful men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis, no realization of
a splendid dream, which they had at heart, but the establishment of the
divine principle of Authority on the common interest and the common
consent; the making, by a contribution from the free-will of all, a power
which should curb and guide the free-will of each for the general good.
If they were stern in their dealings with sectaries, it should be
remembered that the Colony was in fact the private property of the
Massachusetts Company, that unity was essential to its success, and that
John of Leyden had taught them how unendurable by the nostrils of honest
men is the corruption of the right of private judgment in the evil and
selfish hearts of men when no thorough mental training has developed the
understanding and given the judgment its needful means of comparison and
correction. They knew that liberty in the hands of feeble-minded and
unreasoning persons (and all the worse if they are honest) means nothing
more than the supremacy of their particular form of imbecility; means
nothing less, therefore, than downright chaos, a Bedlam-chaos of
monomaniacs and bores. What was to be done with men and women, who bore
conclusive witness to the fall of man by insisting on walking up the
broad-aisle of the meeting-house in a costume which that event had put
forever out of fashion! About their treatment of witches, too, there has
been a great deal of ignorant babble. Puritanism had nothing whatever to
do with it. They acted under a delusion, which, with an exception here
and there (and those mainly medical men, like Wierus and Webster),
darkened the understanding of all Christendom. Dr. Henry More was no
Puritan; and his letter to Glanvil, prefixed to the third edition of the
"Sadducismus Triumphatus," was written in 1678, only fourteen years
before the trials at Salem. Bekker's "Bezauberte Welt" was published in
1693; and in the Preface he speaks of the difficulty of overcoming "the
prejudices in which not only ordinary men, but the learned also, are
obstinate." In Hathaway's case, 1702, Chief-Justice Holt, in charging the
jury, expresses no disbelief in the possibility of witchcraft, and the
indictment implies its existence. Indeed, the natural reaction from the
Salem mania of 1692 put an end to belief in devilish compacts and
demoniac possessions sooner in New England than elsewhere. The last we
hear of it there is in 1720, when Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford detected and
exposed an attempted cheat by two girls. Even in 1692, it was the foolish
breath of Cotton Mather and others of the clergy that blew the dying
embers of this ghastly superstition into a flame; and they were actuated
partly by a desire to bring about a religious revival, which might stay
for a while the hastening lapse of their own authority, and still more by
that credulous scepticism of feeble-minded piety which, dreads the
cutting away of an orthodox tumor of misbelief, as if the life-blood of
faith would follow, and would keep even a stumbling-block in the way of
salvation, if only enough generations had tripped over it to make it
venerable. The witches were condemned on precisely the same grounds that
in our day led to the condemnation of "Essays and Reviews."

But Puritanism was already in the decline when such things were possible.
What had been a wondrous and intimate experience of the soul, a flash
into the very crypt and basis of man's nature from the fire of trial, had
become ritual and tradition. In prosperous times the faith of one
generation becomes the formality of the next. "The necessity of a
reformation," set forth by order of the Synod which met at Cambridge in
1679, though no doubt overstating the case, shows how much even at that
time the ancient strictness had been loosened. The country had grown
rich, its commerce was large, and wealth did its natural work in making
life softer and more worldly, commerce in deprovincializing the minds of
those engaged in it. But Puritanism had already done its duty. As there
are certain creatures whose whole being seems occupied with an egg-laying
errand they are sent upon, incarnate ovipositors, their bodies but bags
to hold this precious deposit, their legs of use only to carry them where
they may safeliest be rid of it, so sometimes a generation seems to have
no other end than the conception and ripening of certain germs. Its blind
stirrings, its apparently aimless seeking hither and thither, are but the
driving of an instinct to be done with its parturient function toward
these principles of future life and power. Puritanism, believing itself
quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the
egg of democracy. The English Puritans pulled down church and state to
rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but
America, they were building. But if their millennium went by, like the
rest, and left men still human; if they, like so many saints and martyrs
before them, listened in vain for the sound of that trumpet which was to
summon all souls to a resurrection from the body of this death which men
call life,--it is not for us, at least, to forget the heavy debt we owe
them. It was the drums of Naseby and Dunbar that gathered the minute-men
on Lexington Common; it was the red dint of the axe on Charles's block
that marked One in our era. The Puritans had their faults. They were
narrow, ungenial; they could not understand the text, "I have piped to
you and ye have not danced," nor conceive that saving one's soul should
be the cheerfullest, and not the dreariest, of businesses. Their
preachers had a way, like the painful Mr. Perkins, of pronouncing the
word _damn_ with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in their
auditors' ears a good while after. And it was natural that men who
captained or accompanied the exodus from existing forms and associations
into the doubtful wilderness that led to the promised land, should find
more to their purpose in the Old Testament than in the New. As respects
the New England settlers, however visionary some of their religious
tenets may have been, their political ideas savored of the realty, and it
was no Nephelococcygia of which they drew the plan, but of a commonwealth
whose foundation was to rest on solid and familiar earth. If what they
did was done in a corner, the results of it were to be felt to the ends
of the earth; and the figure of Winthrop should be as venerable in
history as that of Romulus is barbarously grand in legend.

I am inclined to think that many of our national characteristics, which
are sometimes attributed to climate and sometimes to institutions, are
traceable to the influences of Puritan descent. We are apt to forget how
very large a proportion of our population is descended from emigrants who
came over before 1660. Those emigrants were in great part representatives
of that element of English character which was most susceptible of
religious impressions; in other words, the most earnest and imaginative.
Our people still differ from their English cousins (as they are fond of
calling themselves when they are afraid we may do them a mischief) in a
certain capacity for enthusiasm, a devotion to abstract principle, an
openness to ideas, a greater aptness for intuitions than for the slow
processes of the syllogism, and, as derivative from this, in minds of
looser texture, a light-armed, skirmishing habit of thought, and a
positive preference of the birds in the bush,--an excellent quality of
character _before_ you have your bird in the hand.

There have been two great distributing centres of the English race on
this continent, Massachusetts and Virginia. Each has impressed the
character of its early legislators on the swarms it has sent forth. Their
ideas are in some fundamental respects the opposites of each other, and
we can only account for it by an antagonism of thought beginning with the
early framers of their respective institutions. New England abolished
caste; in Virginia they still talk of "quality folks." But it was in
making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on
all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically
settled. Every man was to be trained, not only to the use of arms, but of
his wits also; and it is these which alone make the others effective
weapons for the maintenance of freedom. You may disarm the hands, but not
the brains, of a people, and to know what should be defended is the first
condition of successful defence. Simple as it seems, it was a great
discovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it could
open, as well as lock, the door of power to the many. The only things a
New-Englander was ever locked out of were the jails. It is quite true
that our Republic is the heir of the English Commonwealth; but as we
trace events backward to their causes, we shall find it true also, that
what made our Revolution a foregone conclusion was that act of the
General Court, passed in May, 1647, which established the system of
common schools. "To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves
of our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our
endeavors, it is therefore ordered by this Court and authority thereof,
that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased
them to fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their
towns to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and
read."

Passing through some Massachusetts village, perhaps at a distance from
any house, it may be in the midst of a piece of woods where four roads
meet, one may sometimes even yet see a small square one-story building,
whose use would not be long doubtful. It is summer, and the flickering
shadows of forest-leaves dapple the roof of the little porch, whose door
stands wide, and shows, hanging on either hand, rows of straw hats and
bonnets, that look as if they had done good service. As you pass the open
windows, you hear whole platoons of high-pitched voices discharging words
of two or three syllables with wonderful precision and unanimity. Then
there is a pause, and the voice of the officer in command is heard
reproving some raw recruit whose vocal musket hung fire. Then the drill
of the small infantry begins anew, but pauses again because some
urchin--who agrees with Voltaire that the superfluous is a very necessary
thing--insists on spelling "subtraction" with an _s_ too much.

If you had the good fortune to be born and bred in the Bay State, your
mind is thronged with half-sad, half-humorous recollections. The a-b abs
of little voices long since hushed in the mould, or ringing now in the
pulpit, at the bar, or in the Senate-chamber, come back to the ear of
memory. You remember the high stool on which culprits used to be elevated
with the tall paper fool's-cap on their heads, blushing to the ears; and
you think with wonder how you have seen them since as men climbing the
world's penance-stools of ambition without a blush, and gladly giving
everything for life's caps and bells. And you have pleasanter memories of
going after pond-lilies, of angling for horn-pouts,--that queer bat among
the fishes,--of nutting, of walking over the creaking snow-crust in
winter, when the warm breath of every household was curling up silently
in the keen blue air. You wonder if life has any rewards more solid and
permanent than the Spanish dollar that was hung around your neck to be
restored again next day, and conclude sadly that it was but too true a
prophecy and emblem of all worldly success. But your moralizing is broken
short off by a rattle of feet and the pouring forth of the whole
swarm,--the boys dancing and shouting,--the mere effervescence of the
fixed air of youth and animal spirits uncorked,--the sedater girls in
confidential twos and threes decanting secrets out of the mouth of one
cape-bonnet into that of another. Times have changed since the jackets
and trousers used to draw up on one side of the road, and the petticoats
on the other, to salute with bow and courtesy the white neckcloth of the
parson or the squire, if it chanced to pass during intermission.

Now this little building, and others like it, were an original kind of
fortification invented by the founders of New England. They are the
martello-towers that protect our coast. This was the great discovery of
our Puritan forefathers. They were the first lawgivers who saw clearly
and enforced practically the simple moral and political truth, that
knowledge was not an alms to be dependent on the chance charity of
private men or the precarious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debt
which the Commonwealth owed to every one of her children. The opening of
the first grammar-school was the opening of the first trench against
monopoly in church and state; the first row of trammels and pothooks
which the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted and blubbered across
their copy-books, was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
The men who gave every man the chance to become a landholder, who made
the transfer of land easy, and put knowledge within the reach of all,
have been called narrow-minded, because they were intolerant. But
intolerant of what? Of what they believed to be dangerous nonsense,
which, if left free, would destroy the last hope of civil and religious
freedom. They had not come here that every man might do that which seemed
good in his own eyes, but in the sight of God. Toleration, moreover, is
something which is won, not granted. It is the equilibrium of neutralized
forces. The Puritans had no notion of tolerating mischief. They looked
upon their little commonwealth as upon their own private estate and
homestead, as they had a right to do, and would no more allow the Devil's
religion of unreason to be preached therein, than we should permit a
prize-fight in our gardens. They were narrow; in other words they had an
edge to them, as men that serve in great emergencies must; for a Gordian
knot is settled sooner with a sword than a beetle.

The founders of New England are commonly represented in the after-dinner
oratory of their descendants as men "before their time," as it is called;
in other words, deliberately prescient of events resulting from new
relations of circumstances, or even from circumstances new in themselves,
and therefore altogether alien from their own experience. Of course, such
a class of men is to be reckoned among those non-existent human varieties
so gravely catalogued by the ancient naturalists. If a man could shape
his action with reference to what should happen a century after his
death, surely it might be asked of him to call in the help of that easier
foreknowledge which reaches from one day to the next,--a power of
prophecy whereof we have no example. I do not object to a wholesome pride
of ancestry, though a little mythical, if it be accompanied with the
feeling that _noblesse oblige_, and do not result merely in a placid
self-satisfaction with our own mediocrity, as if greatness, like
righteousness, could be imputed. We can pardon it even in conquered
races, like the Welsh and Irish, who make up to themselves for present
degradation by imaginary empires in the past whose boundaries they can
extend at will, carrying the bloodless conquests of fancy over regions
laid down upon no map, and concerning which authentic history is
enviously dumb. Those long beadrolls of Keltic kings cannot tyrannize
over us, and we can be patient so long as our own crowns are uncracked by
the shillalah sceptres of their actual representatives. In our own case,
it would not be amiss, perhaps, if we took warning by the example of
Teague and Taffy. At least, I think it would be wise in our orators not
to put forward so prominently the claim of the Yankee to universal
dominion, and his intention to enter upon it forthwith. If we do our
duties as honestly and as much in the fear of God as our forefathers did,
we need not trouble ourselves much about other titles to empire. The
broad foreheads and long heads will win the day at last in spite of all
heraldry, and it will be enough if we feel as keenly as our Puritan
founders did that those organs of empire may be broadened and lengthened
by culture.[136] That our self-complacency should not increase the
complacency of outsiders is not to be wondered at. As _we_ sometimes take
credit to ourselves (since all commendation of our ancestry is indirect
self-flattery) for what the Puritans fathers never were, so there are
others who, to gratify a spite against their descendants, blame them for
not having been what they could not be; namely, before their time in such
matters as slavery, witchcraft, and the like. The view, whether of friend
or foe, is equally unhistorical, nay, without the faintest notion of all
that makes history worth having as a teacher. That our grandfathers
shared in the prejudices of their day is all that makes them human to us;
and that nevertheless they could act bravely and wisely on occasion makes
them only the more venerable. If certain barbarisms and superstitions
disappeared earlier in New England than elsewhere, not by the decision of
exceptionally enlightened or humane judges, but by force of public
opinion, that is the fact that is interesting and instructive for us. I
never thought it an abatement of Hawthorne's genius that he came lineally
from one who sat in judgment on the witches in 1692; it was interesting
rather to trace something hereditary in the sombre character of his
imagination, continually vexing itself to account for the origin of evil,
and baffled for want of that simple solution in a personal Devil.

But I have no desire to discuss the merits or demerits of the Puritans,
having long ago learned the wisdom of saving my sympathy for more modern
objects than Hecuba. My object is to direct the attention of my readers
to a collection of documents where they may see those worthies as they
were in their daily living and thinking. The collections of our various
historical and antiquarian societies can hardly be said to be _published_
in the strict sense of the word, and few consequently are aware how much
they contain of interest for the general reader no less than the special
student. The several volumes of "Winthrop Papers," in especial, are a
mine of entertainment. Here we have the Puritans painted by themselves,
and, while we arrive at a truer notion of the characters of some among
them, and may accordingly sacrifice to that dreadful superstition of
being usefully employed which makes so many bores and bored, we can also
furtively enjoy the oddities of thought and speech, the humors of the
time, which our local historians are too apt to despise as inconsidered
trifles. For myself I confess myself heretic to the established theory of
the gravity of history, and am not displeased with an opportunity to
smile behind my hand at any ludicrous interruption of that sometimes
wearisome ceremonial. I am not sure that I would not sooner give up
Raleigh spreading his cloak to keep the royal Dian's feet from the mud,
than that awful judgment upon the courtier whose Atlantean thighs leaked
away in bran through the rent in his trunk-hose. The painful fact that
Fisher had his head cut off is somewhat mitigated to me by the
circumstance that the Pope should have sent him, of all things in the
world, a cardinal's hat after that incapacitation. Theology herself
becomes less unamiable to me when I find the Supreme Pontiff writing to
the Council of Trent that "they should begin with original sin,
_maintaining yet a due respect for the Emperor_." That infallibility
should thus courtesy to decorum, shall make me think better of it while I
live. I shall accordingly endeavor to give my readers what amusement I
can, leaving it to themselves to extract solid improvement from the
volumes before us, which include a part of the correspondence of three
generations of Winthrops.

Let me premise that there are two men above all others for whom our
respect is heightened by these letters,--the elder John Winthrop and
Roger Williams. Winthrop appears throughout as a truly magnanimous and
noble man in an unobtrusive way,--a kind of greatness that makes less
noise in the world, but is on the whole more solidly satisfying than most
others,--a man who has been dipped in the river of God (a surer baptism
than Styx or dragon's blood) till his character is of perfect proof, and
who appears plainly as the very soul and life of the young Colony. Very
reverend and godly he truly was, and a respect not merely ceremonious,
but personal, a respect that savors of love, shows itself in the letters
addressed to him. Charity and tolerance flow so naturally from the pen of
Williams that it is plain they were in his heart. He does not show
himself a very strong or very wise man, but a thoroughly gentle and good
one. His affection for the two Winthrops is evidently of the warmest. We
suspect that he lived to see that there was more reason in the drum-head
religious discipline which made him, against his will, the founder of a
commonwealth, than he may have thought at first. But for the fanaticism
(as it is the fashion to call the sagacious straitness) of the abler men
who knew how to root the English stock firmly in this new soil on either
side of him, his little plantation could never have existed, and he
himself would have been remembered only, if at all, as one of the jarring
atoms in a chaos of otherwise-mindedness.

Two other men, Emanuel Downing and Hugh Peter, leave a positively
unpleasant savor in the nostrils. Each is selfish in his own
way,--Downing with the shrewdness of an attorney, Peter with that
clerical unction which in a vulgar nature so easily degenerates into
greasiness. Neither of them was the man for a forlorn hope, and both
returned to England when the civil war opened prospect of preferment
there. Both, we suspect, were inclined to value their Puritanism for its
rewards in this world rather than the next. Downing's son, Sir George,
was basely prosperous, making the good cause pay him so long as it was
solvent, and then selling out in season to betray his old commander,
Colonel Okey, to the shambles at Charing Cross. Peter became a colonel in
the Parliament's army, and under the Protectorate one of Cromwell's
chaplains. On his trial, after the Restoration, he made a poor figure, in
striking contrast to some of the brave men who suffered with him. At his
execution a shocking brutality was shown. "When Mr Cook was cut down and
brought to be quartered, one they called Colonel Turner calling to the
Sheriff's men to bring Mr Peters near, that he might see it; and by and
by the Hangman came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloody
hands together, he tauntingly asked, _Come, how do you like this, Mr.
Peters? How do you like this work?_"[137] This Colonel Turner can hardly
have been other than the one who four years later came to the hangman's
hands for robbery; and whose behavior, both in the dock and at the
gallows, makes his trial one of the most entertaining as a display of
character. Peter would seem to have been one of those men gifted with
what is sometimes called eloquence; that is, the faculty of stating
things powerfully from momentary feeling, and not from that conviction of
the higher reason which alone can give force and permanence to words. His
letters show him subject, like others of like temperament, to fits of
"hypocondriacal melancholy," and the only witness he called on his trial
was to prove that he was confined to his lodgings by such an attack on
the day of the king's beheading. He seems to have been subject to this
malady at convenience, as some women to hysterics. Honest John Endicott
plainly had small confidence in him, and did not think him the right man
to represent the Colony in England. There is a droll resolve in the
Massachusetts records by which he is "desired to write to Holland for
500_l._ worth of _peter_, & 40_l._ worth of match." It is with a match
that we find him burning his fingers in the present correspondence.

Peter seems to have entangled himself somehow with a Mrs. Deliverance
Sheffield, whether maid or widow nowhere appears, but presumably the
latter. The following statement of his position is amusing enough: "I
have sent Mrs D. Sh. letter, which puts mee to new troubles, for though
shee takes liberty upon my Cossen Downing's speeches, yet (Good Sir) let
mee not be a foole in Israel. I had many good answers to yesterday's
worke [a Fast] and amongst the rest her letter; which (if her owne) doth
argue more wisedome than I thought shee had. You have often sayd I could
not leave her; what to doe is very considerable. Could I with comfort &
credit desist, this seemes best: could I goe on & content myselfe, that
were good.... For though I now seeme free agayne, yet the depth I know
not. Had shee come over with me, I thinke I had bin quieter. This shee
may know, that I have sought God earnestly, that the nexte weeke I shall
bee riper:--I doubt shee gaynes most by such writings: & shee deserves
most where shee is further of. If you shall amongst you advise mee to
write to hir, I shall forthwith; our towne lookes upon mee contracted &
so I have sayd myselfe; what wonder the charge [change?] would make, I
know not." Again: "Still pardon my offensive boldnes: I know not well
whither Mrs Sh. have set mee at liberty or not: my conclusion is, that if
you find I cannot make an honorable retreat, then I shall desire to
advance [Greek: sun Theo]. Of you I now expect your last advise, viz:
whither I must goe on or of, _saluo evangelij honore_: if shee bee in
good earnest to leave all agitations this way, then I stand still & wayt
God's mind concerning mee.... If I had much mony I would part with it to
her free, till wee heare what England doth, supposing I may bee called to
some imployment that will not suit a marryed estate": (here another mode
of escape presents itself, and he goes on:) "for indeed (Sir) some must
looke out & I have very strong thoughts to speake with the Duitch
Governor & lay some way there for a supply &c." At the end of the letter,
an objection to the lady herself occurs to him: "Once more for Mrs Sh: I
had from Mr Hibbins & others, her fellowpassengers, sad discouragements
where they saw her in her trim. I would not come of with dishonor, nor
come on with griefe, or ominous hesitations." On all this shilly-shally
we have a shrewd comment in a letter of Endicott: "I cannot but acquaint
you with my thoughts concerning Mr Peter since hee receaued a letter from
Mrs Sheffield, which was yesterday in the eveninge after the Fast, shee
seeming in her letter to abate of her affeccions towards him & dislikinge
to come to Salem vppon such termes as he had written. I finde now that
hee begins to play her parte, & if I mistake not, you will see him as
greatly in loue with her (if shee will but hold of a little) as euer shee
was with him; but he conceales it what he can as yett. The begininge of
the next weeke you will heare further from him." The widow was evidently
more than a match for poor Peter.

It should appear that a part of his trouble arose from his having
coquetted also with a certain Mrs. Ruth, about whom he was "dealt with by
Mrs Amee, Mr Phillips & 2 more of the Church, our Elder being one. When
Mr Phillips with much violence & sharpnes charged mee home ... that I
should hinder the mayd of a match at London, which was not so, could not
thinke of any kindnes I euer did her, though shee haue had above 300_li._
through my fingers, so as if God uphold me not after an especiall manner,
it will sinke me surely ... hee told me he would not stop my intended
marriage, but assured mee it would not bee good ... all which makes mee
reflect upon my rash proceedings with Mrs Sh." Panurge's doubts and
difficulties about matrimony were not more entertainingly contradictory.
Of course, Peter ends by marrying the widow, and presently we have a
comment on "her trim." In January, 1639, he writes to Winthrop: "My wife
is very thankfull for her apples, & _desires much the new fashioned
shooes_." Eight years later we find him writing from England, where he
had been two years: "I am coming over if I must; my wife comes of
necessity to New England, having run her selfe out of breath here"; and
then in the postscript, "bee sure you never let my wife come away from
thence without my leave, & then you love mee." But life is never pure
comedy, and the end in this case is tragical. Roger Williams, after his
return from England in 1654, writes to John Winthrop, Jr.: "Your brother
flourisheth in good esteeme & is eminent for maintaining the Freedome of
the Conscience as to matters of Beliefe, Religion, & Worship. Your Father
Peters preacheth the same Doctrine though not so zealously as some years
since, yet cries out against New English Rigidities & Persecutions, their
civil injuries & wrongs to himselfe, & their unchristian dealing with him
in excommunicating his distracted wife. All this he tould me in his
lodgings at Whitehall, those lodgings which I was tould were Canterburies
[the Archbishop], but he himselfe tould me that that Library wherein we
were together was Canterburies & given him by the Parliament. His wife
lives from him, not wholy but much distracted. He tells me he had but 200
a yeare & he allowed her 4 score per annum of it. Surely, Sir, the most
holy Lord is most wise in all the trialls he exerciseth his people with.
He tould me that his affliction from his wife stird him up to Action
abroad, & when successe tempted him to Pride, the Bitternes in his
bozome-comforts was a Cooler & a Bridle to him." Truly the whirligig of
time brings about strange revenges. Peter had been driven from England by
the persecutions of Laud; a few years later he "stood armed on the
scaffold" when that prelate was beheaded, and now we find him installed
in the archiepiscopal lodgings. Dr. Palfrey, it appears to me, gives
altogether too favorable an opinion both of Peter's character and
abilities. I conceive him to have been a vain and selfish man. He may
have had the bravery of passionate impulse, but he wanted that steady
courage of character which has such a beautiful constancy in Winthrop. He
always professed a longing to come back to New England, but it was only a
way he had of talking. That he never meant to come is plain from these
letters. Nay, when things looked prosperous in England, he writes to the
younger Winthrop: "My counsell is you should come hither with your family
for certaynly you will bee capable of a comfortable living in this free
Commonwealth. I doo seriously advise it.... G. Downing is worth 500_l_.
per annum but 4_l_. per diem--your brother Stephen worth 2000_l_. & a
maior. I pray come." But when he is snugly ensconced in Whitehall, and
may be presumed to have some influence with the prevailing powers, his
zeal cools. "I wish you & all friends to stay there & rather looke to the
West Indyes if they remoue, for many are here to seeke when they come
ouer." To me Peter's highest promotion seems to have been that he walked
with John Milton at the Protector's funeral. He was, I suspect, one of
those men, to borrow a charitable phrase of Roger Williams, who "feared
God in the main," that is, whenever it was not personally inconvenient.
William Coddington saw him in his glory in 1651: "Soe wee toucke the tyme
to goe to viset Mr Petters at his chamber. I was mery with him & called


 


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