The Chief End of Man Part 10

That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under all the forms of Protestant supernaturalism. Part of it, no doubt, may be referred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appeal to look much beyond the immediate present. But in great part too it springs from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world which the preacher so fluently and fervently declares.

It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the ma.s.s of men did believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church. But what hardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church's doctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life.

This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the human body and its laws, the pa.s.sion of s.e.x, productive industry, the organization of society,--in short, with all the impulses, instincts, and powers of man,--through a cloud of misapprehension.

The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significant as the antechamber to another. Hence its occupations, responsibilities, joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directly related to the other life. This naturally bred a false att.i.tude toward many of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engage the attention of men.

The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit.

The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to human weakness.

Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit. The charter of divine truth was the Bible, and its interpreter was the church. Since this world was only the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pa.s.s away, it was idle to spend much study on it.

Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mere elucidation of the dogmas of the church. As soon as those dogmas were even remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril. In repressing heretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church was discharging a plain duty.

Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue.

One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain. The highest symbol of religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.

The belief in a h.e.l.l of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous and ghastly brood of imaginations. How far the dread thus inspired acted as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess. Too well we know the torture it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind, which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.

Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the mediaeval churchmen. Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other directions bore n.o.ble fruit.

Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.

There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope. Compared with the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse. h.e.l.l, Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification, his hope.

Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness. But in Dante is a force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and woman. It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental. Thirteen hundred years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity. Out of chivalry, half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman. If was truly a "new life."

Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the "Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy which has almost more of pain than pleasure. Under an earthly symbol it is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the pa.s.sion of the soul for what lies beyond its full grasp.

In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology. In reality he lives by the ideal relation with Beatrice. For him the true Purgatory is his self-reproach in her presence. The boundless joy of reunion after a lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of h.e.l.l could awaken. The anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.

Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen centuries of Christianity? He shows evil existing in its worst forms and in wide extent. The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him. The sin whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an imaginary partic.i.p.ation in Adam's trespa.s.s, or the mere human shadows against a dazzling ideal of purity. In the men of his own time and in his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--l.u.s.t, cruelty, treachery. The physical h.e.l.l he imagines in another world is the counterpart of the moral h.e.l.l he sees about him in this world. In his Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival. Much of it is to the modern reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.

In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and spiritual ideals has been the movement of coa.r.s.er forces--often seeming to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.

In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of military force. Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of n.o.ble sentiment running into fantasy.

Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge. Wealth grew first by the a.s.sociation of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.

Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with the East.

A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced society.

Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.

Printing made the Reformation possible.

The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real knowledge.

The growing wealth of the middle cla.s.s gave freedom to England,--the merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary party.

A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--the use of ca.n.a.ls, textile machinery, steam, electricity. This has created a new cla.s.s of rich. It has improved the condition of the laboring man, not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more.

Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism, giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper cla.s.s; commerce, discovery, invention, raising first the middle cla.s.s and then the lower,--these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated to realize the ideal.

Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Roman court. He made the quarrel on a moral question. No man, he said, could sell a license from G.o.d to commit sin. If the Pope said otherwise, the Pope was a liar and no vicegerent of G.o.d. So he put in the forefront of the revolting forces a moral idea.

He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles, and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood. He gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue. He taught by word and example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a life consecrated to G.o.d.

He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest. He was wholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life of humanity. His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience, under the forms of an antiquated theology. He was narrow; he confounded the friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding of the social and political needs of the time; he was full of superst.i.tion, and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent and wrathful. But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierly temper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflective men held back; and he won the leaders.h.i.+p of the new age when against all the pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth as he saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; G.o.d help me!"

Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther. For thirty-six years--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working out his theory. The book containing it he did not venture to publish, till under Paul III. there was a lull in the storm. He was a loyal Catholic, but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church. He kept alive just long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the age of seventy. Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.

The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic church. They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church, claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its morals, as in the matter of the indulgences. They found courage to do it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly without the church's intervention. That was one side of the revolt: the other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be impatient of any foreign control.

But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended with the authority of the Roman priesthood. Theirs was in no sense an intellectually creative movement. Politically and socially it had great effects. Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_.

Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly. The early Protestants found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with pa.s.sions stimulated by the sense that authority was weakening. They saw no other resource, their own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural world. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught; its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute. The traditional Protestant orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled.

Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the imagination is less strong.

But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on the minds of men. Shakspere paints the most various, active, and pa.s.sionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of future retribution,--a.s.sure him only of success _here_, and

"We 'd jump the life to come."

It is impossible to pa.s.s the exhaustless Shakspere without some further word of inadequate comment. Apparently no one in his day guessed that among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this obscure playwright was the intellectual king. But Time has more than redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but sometimes wors.h.i.+ped as an oracle. The prime secret of his power, compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality.

It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays, and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world. It is a change of standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were to attain with the new weapons. Shakspere has no thought of mankind's advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds and portrays the universe about him. We get some idea of what the change means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored, genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the dramatist's page. Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a phantasmagoria. In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we have lost heaven and escaped h.e.l.l, but have taken fresh hold on earthly life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.

In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue and vice. In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness, purity, and the ugliness of their opposites. Measure him at the most critical point, chast.i.ty. His plays have plenty of coa.r.s.eness; they have touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always leave us with the sense that purity is n.o.ble and impurity is evil. It is striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions.

His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual putrescence. In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing little discredit and no punishment. Later in the great plays the note of chast.i.ty is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is n.o.bly depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a pa.s.sionate abhorrence of vice. In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra,"

it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their pa.s.sion, escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.

In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared, but the moral law is still supreme. Yet in some ways it is a very unsatisfying world. In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy.

All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace that pa.s.seth understanding." We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by any solution. There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant deliverance. We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher manhood. Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate. Man's confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet."

The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters; it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest sensibilities and n.o.blest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of confusion, of unfathomable mystery. The ghost from the other world is a mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick, and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones does not even occur to Hamlet as a question. Yet when he is tempted to take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is sufficient to deter him. The thought suggests no hope, only a vague restraining fear. But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of wrong-doing. The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom over the whole drama.

It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that we miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to human nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowhere depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and resolutely pursued. His world is rich in pa.s.sion, but deficient in clear and high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking.

He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid us to live our own life. His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or strength to our wavering will.

Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere is wholesome and even invigorating. We are helped in our higher life by many influences besides direct moral teaching. One takes a twenty-mile tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener. So from an hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier being. It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though seen but in part.

The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light pa.s.sing was thus colored. We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings; the great encompa.s.sing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town.

There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life in the Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a pa.s.sion delicate and profound, striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness in the object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover. More distinct is the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town, the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will. Prosaic enough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that this great genius and pa.s.sionate soul bore himself among the materialities, where so many make s.h.i.+pwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness which brought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age. So much Shakspere certainly had in himself,--this homely yet vital self-command. With this is to be taken that he had also that intellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is the creation of great works of art. Self-control, prudential and intellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity and strength.