LECTURE II
CLEON
LECTURE II
CLEON
Between Caliban and Cleon a wide gulf is fixed: between the savage sprawling in “the pit’s much mire,” gloating over his powers of inflicting suffering, at once cowering before and insulting his god: and the cultured Greek, inhabitant of “the sprinkled isles,” poet, philosopher, artist, musician, sitting in his “portico, royal with sunset,” reflecting on the purposes of life, his own achievements and the design of Zeus in creation, which, though inscrutable, he yet must hold to have been beneficent. Could contrast be anywhere more striking than that suggested by these two scenes? And yet amidst outward dissimilarity there is a point towards which all their lines converge. On one subject of reflection alone, this man, the product of Greek intellectual life and culture, has hardly passed beyond that of the savage awakening to a “sense of sense.” To both alike death means the end of life, to neither does any glimpse of light reveal itself beyond the grave. And death to the Greek is infinitely more terrible than to the son of Sycorax. To Caliban the belief that “with the life the pain will stop,” affords a feeling akin to relief in the present, when the mental discomfort arising from fear of Setebos temporarily over-powers the physical satisfaction to be derived from basking in the sun. To Cleon, possessed of the capacity for “loving life so over-much,” the idea of death affords so terrible a suggestion that its very horror forces upon him at times the necessity of the acceptance of some theory involving belief in the immortality of the soul. Thus we have moved onwards one step, though one step only, in the ladder of thought, of which Caliban’s soliloquy constitutes the lowest rung. The inert conjectures, the vague surmises of the savage are succeeded by the reflections and subsequent logical deductions of the man of intellectual culture, culminating in the anguished cry:
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man.
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Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus.
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... But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it, and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible! (Cleon, 11. 321-335.)
Different as are the modes of contemplating death, differing as the character and environment of the soliloquist, one is yet in a sense the outcome of the other, an exemplification of Cleon’s own assertion:
In man there’s failure, only since he left
The lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. 125-126.)
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Most progress is most failure. (l. 272.)
With the opening out of wider possibilities to the mind comes the consciousness of the gulf between actuality and ideality. To Caliban, whose pleasurable conceptions of life are bounded by the prospect of defrauding Prospero of his services, lying in the mire
Drinking the mash, with brain become alive,
Making and marring clay at will; (Caliban, 11. 96-97.)