Part 11 (1/2)
One loves to see in ”The Tempest” the crowning utterance of his maturity.
How wise, how n.o.ble it is, and the wisdom and n.o.bility set forth in what exquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor! As in Hamlet we seem to see Shakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think we recognize the ideal of his ripeness. There is the wise man torn from books and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea; there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; struggle with b.e.s.t.i.a.l evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in the happiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; the admonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of pa.s.sion. So wise, so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation. A shadow flits across, in the thought of mortal transiency:--
”We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep.”
Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment: ”Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;” the coming encounter with Caliban has shaken him. Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led ”by Providence divine;” an instinct of a ”divinity that shapes our ends;” and again, the mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end.
Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim,--the belief in a divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral purpose,--these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely borrowing it for a dramatic purpose. The men of religion had no such consummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had their Taylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look at them in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type.
But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a man of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominal Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaigne reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a world of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almost totally absent.
Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definite religious purpose or a strong religious faith. In contrast with him is the Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve a divine destiny. The typical Puritan addressed himself to man's foes,--all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing, as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as h.e.l.l. To escape from these was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believed in--Holiness, Life, and Heaven.
The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest men sought to know its truths experimentally,--to take home the full sense of them. This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and, responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat. The result of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it was indeed a warfare,--first, against his own l.u.s.ts, then against the evils in the world around him. These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope, the head of a false religion, the oppressor of G.o.d's people; in the imitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all false belief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself.
The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, and purposed at every cost to achieve it. ”Man's chief end is to glorify G.o.d and enjoy him forever.” There was also the most dreadful possibility to be shunned. All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the great adversary of souls.
The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology was the guide to heaven. They believed this as modern men believe that science is the guide to human life. Hence, an infinite diversity of sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.
The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life. It touched and fired the imagination of the common people. The dominant idea on which the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of G.o.d's chosen people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by a constant intervention of rewards and punishments. This conception they transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed traitorously to incline. They proposed to purify and maintain the church in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.
The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality.
The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on the ultimate reality. It renounced the aid of art and embodied imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material beauty, none from knowledge of nature.
This religion had an appalling side. Foremost among its teachings was man's depravity and the terrible wrath of G.o.d. The worst cruelty of the Iroquois was mercy compared to G.o.d's dealing with sinners. This was an inheritance from an older religion. But the condition of salvation in the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically obedience to the church. But the Puritan required a conscious change of heart, which to many was impossible. The utmost pains were taken that the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless accompanied by this mystic experience.
Catholicism put man under guardians.h.i.+p through the hierarchy, the confessional, the whole church system. Calvinism threw him on his own resources,--set him face to face with G.o.d. It, too, set a church to help him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own peace with G.o.d. This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made them sombre. It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.
The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious enthusiasms, which carried high expectations. Milton looked for a wonderful advance in truth. The Puritan sought to build a church simple in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of its members, and subjecting the unG.o.dly to a rule of the saints. Charles the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.
The wave pa.s.sed, and these expectations had failed. But the force of the Puritan movement had accomplished certain things. It had turned the tide of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.
In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the composite forces of national life; const.i.tutional monarchy was established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and possibilities of the actual world.
Milton was a man of heroic mould. He governed himself by a deliberate and lofty moral purpose. The thirst for ”moral perfection” inspired and ruled his life. He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan.
He was open on all sides to the n.o.blest influences. The heroic antique temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him. He was at heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of his time.
Yet his genius was cramped by his theology. He could not fuse the conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution, Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements of English political society. He is like his own lion ”struggling to get free.” His epic is a story of disaster. His deity is undivine. There is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his Jehovah or Adam.
The best thing he gives us is his own n.o.ble personality, imbuing the majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power. Servant and friend of Cromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need, champion of freedom, wors.h.i.+per of truth, building in neglected solitude his epic,--his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater than the imaginary Hamlet, Oth.e.l.lo, or Brutus.
Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought,--a heroic nature struggling with irreconcilable elements. Each is confronted by a situation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully master it, they deal with it like men.
Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and his creations,--here is the greater world than Shakspere saw,--men grappling with their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives.
The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops, father and son. When the migration is determined on, the son writes: ”For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that my country where I may most glorify G.o.d and enjoy the presence of my dearest friends. Therefore herein I submit myself to G.o.d's will and yours, and, with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of other employments whatsoever) to the service of G.o.d and the company herein, with the whole endeavors both of body and mind.”
The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in his religious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, which are full of manly strength and sweetness. He combined some of the chief elements of greatness,--loftiness of aim; a character disinterested, patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personal tenderness.
To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim is moral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover. The sense of a Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religion means to him. In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his private diary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on the attainment of a personal and social ideal.