God is also merciful. In "Titus Andronicus" (I: I: 117) we read:

Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful.

Shakespeare's noblest and completest delineation of female character is that of Portia in the "Merchant of Venice." When Portia sits as doctor of laws and legal adviser of the Duke, we hear from her lips the mingled praise of justice and mercy, and we have an unequaled passage in which the conceptions of the two attributes are so combined that the one qualifies and heightens the other (4175):

The quality of mercy is not [con] strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath it is twice bless'd,
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes :
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings:

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God's,
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy.

Such is the poet's view of the divine nature.

What

now is his view of human nature? Is man the victim

MAN'S FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

197

of heredity and environment? The only reply is, that man has moral freedom; that he may do the right and avoid the wrong. The citizen in "Coriolanus" (2:33), when told that he may do an unjust thing, replies: "We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do." And in "Twelfth Night" (34 351), Antonio protests:

In nature there's no blemish but the mind;
None can be call'd deform'd but the unkind.
Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the devil.

As men have freedom, they cannot lay the blame of their transgression either upon nature or upon God. Edmund, the double-dyed villain in "King Lear" (1 : 2 : 108), acknowledges that this is only the insincere apology of the guilty:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune-often the surfeit of our own behavior-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains of 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.

In "All's Well That Ends Well" (1:1: 155) Helena declares:

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;

and in “Julius Cæsar" (1: 2: 135), Cassius says nobly

Men at some time are masters of their fates;
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Dr. Flint in his essay on "Theism" has well said that "Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed for as the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there is a marked inability to think of God as cause or will, and a constant tendency to pantheism." We only utter the complementary truth when we say that where the will is a bounding activity of individual and national life, there is always a strong conviction of the personality of God and the freedom of man. This is peculiarly true of the Elizabethan age, and it is markedly seen in Shakespeare, its noblest writer. Man is capable of good, but he is also capable of freely willing evil.

Robert G. Ingersoll, in his lecture on Shakespeare, represents the poet as holding that crime is only the result of ignorance. Shakespeare holds precisely the opposite. With him, "the wish is father to the thought" ("King Henry IV.," Part II., 4:5:93), not the thought father to the wish. Says Suffolk ("King Henry VI.," Part I., 24:7):

Faith, I have been a truant in the law,
And never yet could frame my will to it,
And therefore frame the law unto my will.

And Troilus ("Troilus and Cressida," 4 : 4: 94) witnesses

that

Sometimes we are devils to ourselves,

When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency.

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199

The angels fell by ambition ("King Henry VIII.," 3:2: 439), and man too "falls like Lucifer" (Idem, 3:2: 369).

Sin begins in the abuse of free-will, but by that abuse man makes himself a slave. One sin leads to another.

Says Pericles (I : I: 137):

One sin, I know, another doth provoke ;
Murder's as near to lust, as flame to smoke.

and Richard III. confesses (4:2:63):

I am in

So far in blood, that sin will pluck on sin.

This sin may come to be a fixed state of obstinate selfassertion, an apotheosis of self, that defies both God and man. Coriolanus (54:23) "wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in;" "there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger.'

In "Richard III." and in "Macbeth" we have Shakespeare's representations of hubris, the one unpardonable sin of the Greek tragedy. Iago too is a willful hater of all good, and Goneril and Regan show that human nature may consciously and deliberately surrender itself to evil. "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" inquires Lear (3775). The suggested answer is, that what nature never did, and never could do, man's evil will has done; he has so perverted his nature that it has become utterly unnatural.

And yet while there is danger of reaching a point where the sinner will be too infirm of purpose to strive any longer for the good, there is still in all men a re

mainder of freedom, and a possibility of change for the better. What the king in "Hamlet" (4:7:117) says with regard to the evil deed is equally true with regard to the good deed:

That we would do,

We should do when we would; for this "would" changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;

And then this "should" is like a spendthrift sigh,

That hurts by easing.

The player-king in the same drama (3:2:171) declares

that

Purpose is but the slave to memory ;

Of violent birth, but poor validity.

And Hamlet himself advises his mother (3:4:163):

Refrain to-night;

And that shall lend a kind of easiness

To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use can almost change the stamp of nature,
And either master the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.

Here there is recognized a "stamp of nature," an evil taint of blood. No poet of the world has more fully and constantly acknowledged man's congenital depravity. Timon of Athens (4:3: 18) proclaims that

There's nothing level in our cursed natures,
But direct villainy.

In "All's Well That Ends Well" (4:3: 18) we read: "Now, God delay our rebellion! as we are ourselves, what things are we! Merely our own traitors!" In "Measure for Measure" (1: 2: 120):