Love at

and Mi

CH. XII. outside reason, it still remains to give increased reality to the story by exhibiting the supernatural element as intimately associated with phases of common life that already possess a hold upon our sympathies. Where then are to be found elements of common life that have kinship with enchantment? May not one of them be seen in what is described by the phrase, 'love at first sight,' which, as if miraculously, first sight. transforms the lovers to one another's eyes by the mere Story of Ferdinand shock of their first meeting? Ordinary parlance suggests as much when it describes such lovers as 'smitten' with one another, touched with an enchanter's wand, causing them to see in each other visions of perfection not perceptible to ordinary beholders. At all events, this is the idea which gives unity to the Story of Ferdinand and Miranda; it is not merely one of the hundred love stories of the Elizabethan drama, but it is an ideal study of 'love at first sight,' complete in all its stages. First we have the lovers prepared for their meeting. Miranda awakes out of a charmed sleep to behold Ferdinand for the first time:

randa.

i. ii. 375;
iii. i; iv.
i; v. i. 172.

Prospero. The fringed curtains of thine eye advance
And say what thou seest yond.
Miranda.

What is 't? a spirit?

So Ferdinand is drawn to the spot by supernatural music, until he sees

Most sure, the goddess

On whom these airs attend.

The mutual shock follows. At the first sight they have changed eyes,' says the delighted Prospero, and Ferdinand confesses:

The very instant that I saw you, did

My heart fly to your service; there resides,

To make me slave to it.

Accident favours the immediate betrayal of their feelings:

Miranda.

This

the first

Ferdinand forgets his own danger to exclaim :

O, if a virgin,

And your affection not gone forth, I'll make you
The queen of Naples.

Trouble follows to bind them closer and closer together, and Miranda steals away to the log-house to cast the gleam of her sympathy and pretty fancies over Ferdinand's ignoble service, until it is 'fresh morning with him when she is by at night.' Finally the cloud of trouble rolls away, and the incidents of the Masque and the game of chess give us glimpses into the pure intercourse of a lovers' paradise.

CH. XII.

a Intoxica

tion a comic counterpart

Similarly, the comic side of common life contains counterpart to enchantment in intoxication, that fills its victim with delusions alike of heart and of head. And it is to Enchantment. this which gives unity to the Underplot of the Butler and Comic Jester; the bottle saved from the wreck dominates it through- Underout. Moreover, while intoxication might be presented in plot. many different aspects—as loathsome, as wicked, as gro- ii; iv. i. ii. ii; iii tesque, as dangerous-here its transforming power is dwelt 165; v. i. upon. Caliban is transformed into a worshipper, with the 256. drunken butler for his god. Stephano pours wine down the throat of the supposed dead moon-calf, and, by a fine stroke of detail, Shakespeare makes Caliban, at this first taste of alcohol, break from prose into blank verse, which he maintains through the scene:

These be fine things, an if they be not sprites;
That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor.

Another pull at the bottle, and the apotheosis of Stephano is
far advanced :

Caliban. Hast thou not dropp'd from heaven?

Stephano. Out o' the moon, I do assure thee: I was the man i' the moon when time was.

Caliban. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee.

Another draught and he is kissing his god's foot and

CH. XII. dancing on the threshold of a new dispensation. So Stephano is transformed into a king, and disposes the spoils of the clothes-line; Trinculo into an expectant viceroy; all three into an expeditionary force on the point of achieving a conquest:

So full of valour that they smote the air

For breathing in their faces, beat the ground
For kissing of their feet.

With drunken infirmity of purpose they pursue their project,
and are diverted by easy lures of Ariel into the paths of
destruction; drunk they appear at the close under their
punishment; and the last stroke in the comic underplot is
the awakening of Caliban out of his enchantment:

What a thrice-double ass

Was I, to take this drunkard for a god.

It is such treatment as this which Shakespeare has applied to The Tempest that entitles it to be called a Drama of Enchantment. The term does not merely mean a story of ordinary life in which superhuman beings are allowed to interpose the world of this play is penetrated through and through by the supernatural; from the supernatural it takes Dramatic its tone and colour. The very scene, insulated like a magic Colouring circle, is excluded from the commonplace, and is confined to

that remoteness of nature in which distance from the real presents itself as nearness to the unseen. On the enchanted island there is nothing to break the spell by a suggestion of every-day experience, and the atmosphere is electrical with enchantment; while the inhabitants, untouched by social influences, are formed equally by nature and magic. As the story moves before us, the laws of nature-the basis of our sense of reality-appear suspended, and it is the unnatural which presents itself as a thing of law. When at last personages of familiar experience are introduced they fall mysterious influence, and their realism

remind us how much of real life is permeated by Enchant- CH. XII.
ment. It only remains to add how a single passage goes
beyond the field of the story, and flashes the dominant
colour of the play upon human life as a whole, hinting in
powerful language that real life is the greatest enchantment
of all. The Masque of Spirits has vanished into air,—into
thin air :

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind!

iv. i. 150.

CH. XIII.

Theory of
Central
Ideas.

XIII.

HOW THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE TEMPEST

PRESENTS PERSONAL PROVIDENCE.

THE

A Study in Central Ideas.

For one

HE criticism that addresses itself to the function of interpreting literature was early attracted to the discovery of Central Ideas in plays and poems. The treatment, however, has not always been favourably received. thing, critics were found not to agree in their results: and, when different suggestions were put forward, each as a complete explanation of the same work, the suspicion naturally would arise that the interpreters had put into the plays the ideas which they professed to bring out of them. Moreover, a hasty use of terms led to the confusion between a 'central idea' and a mere lesson, or reflection, derivable (with fifty others) from the course of a story, in the way in which an accomplished preacher will draw the whole gospel out of half a clause. Thus the theory of Central, Ideas has been discredited yet surely the presumption is in its favour. The existence of some harmony binding together all varieties of detail into a unity is a fundamental conception of art: the only further question is whether, for any particular play, this unity can be formulated in words. In contending, as I am in the present work, for a strictly inductive treatment I would point out that the question of Central