To show how congenial this belief is to the human mind, we need only remember that it constituted the pivot on which speculation turned, as well in Ancient India as in Egypt, where Brahm and Phtha, constituting the basis of being, determined the nature of all forms of existence emanating from them. In modern language the word Divinity has by a gentle euphemism been substituted for Destiny:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

Here the direction of human action is taken out of the hands of men by an overruling power, which must, at the same time, take upon itself the responsibility, as well as the irresistible influence. But this sort of pious impiety springs obviously in Shakespeare from a reverential feeling and earnest solicitude to avoid even the appearance of withdrawing in theory human nature from subjection to God. Still, strictly interpreted, it is as complete a profession of fatalism as that of Hobbes, who declares unscrupulously that if the thief be destined to steal, the executioner is destined to hang him.

Hobbes may have been sincere in his sophistical reasoning, but Shakespeare, if pressed on the subject, will not, though he also may be sincere, hold to the conclusions suggested by his premises, and maintain that man is an irresponsible creature; he will rather fall back on the doctrine of original sin, or any other contradiction, than teach that man is not answerable for his conduct and suffers chastisement when he has done amiss, even in this world:

We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

No act of wickedness or folly, or even of imprudence, escapes in Shakespeare punishment of some kind, often, however, wholly disproportioned to the offence; for Juliet and Romeo encounter the same fate as Macbeth, Iago, and Richard: I mean as far as their bodies are concerned; for these criminals, whom antiquity would have classed with Tityus, Sisyphus, and Tantalus, are thrust forth from life in remorse and agony, while death closes the eyes of the lovers in a paroxysm of rapture.

If we embody fate in the shape of death, it obviously comes to all, though its form and significance vary with everyone that dies, because the life that it closes has inevitably varied. Almost every prevalent belief in the seventeenth century implied more or less distinctly the subjection of man to invincible necessity. If some great criminal who would have derived pleasure from repeating the banquet of Thyestes was to be visited by Nemesis, a bright and menacing star issued from the depths of space to give intimation to 'the world's poor people' that the act of justice was at hand. Again, the raging of pestilences, the occurrence of seditions, the breaking forth of terrible wars, the existence of unnatural enmities between brother and brother, or between father and son, were sure to be preceded by portents and prodigies in the heavens.

Gloucester. These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects: love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father.

Long before he wrote this passage Shakespeare had given expression to the pity, closely akin to scorn,

with which he beheld the grovelling superstition of his time:

Look, how the world's poor people are amazed

At apparitions, signs and prodigies,

Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gazed,

Infusing them with dreadful prophecies.

Later in life, when his philosophy had gained more consistency, and his contempt become more robust, he ventured on a plainer style of speaking, though he still considered it politic to put forth his opinion through a character whose teaching he might disclaim:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,-often the surfeit of our own behaviour,-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.

·

Shakespeare clearly means us to accept this as implying a refutation of all he may ever have said in favour of fatality. The speaker, conscious that he must take the responsibility of his deeds, so that he can triumph on this bank and shoal of time,' resolves, like Macbeth, to jump the life to come. The course of action he has traced out for himself appears so brilliant, as seen through the eyes of ambition, that he burns to obliterate from his mind all distinction between good and evil, though he scoffs at the popular persuasion that man is what he is by a divine thrusting on. Tut!' he exclaims scornfully, 'I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.'

Euripides intimates by the lips of Jocasta his dissent from the form which belief in fate had assumed

among the tragic poets his predecessors. He had probably discussed this question with Socrates, who is thought to have aided him in the composition of his plays, and if so his influence may be surely supposed to have chiefly exerted itself in giving a loftier character to his philosophy. In his scheme of thought, Pepromene holds back her iron hand, till man invites her to begin the process which Shakespeare denominates a divine thrusting on.

Laius consulting the oracle at Delphi respecting his childless state is warned by the god not to desire children, since, if he should have a son, that son would be his murderer. Having set the oracle at nought, a son is born to him, and all the crimes and sorrows of the house of Labdacus ensue. Here man is made the arbiter of his own destiny; the turning-point in the stream of events is placed before him; everything is left to depend on an act of his will; he may be happy with one drawback; but, if not content to abide by the award of heaven, the consequences of his selfindulgence will be strictly visited on him and his offspring.

Some faint shadow of the same theory is discoverable in Shakespeare, where, as in Euripides, the doctrine is put forward by a woman. Her language, however, is not a little enigmatical :

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

ESSAY XI

PHILOSOPHY: CHARACTER-PHYSICAL SCIENCE-
SLEEP AND DREAMS

THOUGH Shakespeare, however, like Euripides, may suggest a seeming solution of the great problem, he cannot escape from the subtle entanglements of Pepromene. In his plays, as in the world, men act in obedience to the promptings of their inclinations, their dispositions, their characters, and the decisions of their intellect. But a man's disposition, for example, is not of his own making. It is transmitted to him, partly through the same process as his life, partly through the air he breathes, the climate he inhabits, the water he drinks, the food he eats, and the human beings by whom his opening mind is enlightened or obscured. The mingling of the elements in us, which the Greeks expressed by the word 'crasis,' can obviously in no way be influenced by our own will, and yet out of this spring our passions, our desires, our particular hopes and fears, and that modification of our nature which I have spoken of above as our disposition. Shakespeare when considering these things, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in connexion with the physical laws of external nature, is so deeply perplexed that he falls into a wilderness of paradoxes, if not of contradictions. Hamlet is the exponent of one class of his