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.
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