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 superstition, 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 leadership 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; God 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 passions 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 passionate 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,—assure him only of success here, and
"We 'd jump the life to come."
It is impossible to pass 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 worshiped 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 hell, 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, chastity. His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always leave us with the sense that purity is noble 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 chastity is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is nobly depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a passionate 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 passion, 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 passeth 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 noblest 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 passion, 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.