not meaningless: there is a certain beauty as we contemplate the child life consummated in its own simplicity, before the weight of coming maturity has effaced a single lineament of childhood's own special grace. Nemesis has no application, but there is room for pathos. It is however zeal for the idealising of life that has given strength to the contention that in poetry at all events character alone must determine fate. But, in the spirit of the Book of Job, we may make bold to say that such invariability of retribution lowers the conception of human life; the world becomes not less but more ideal where the providential system of government gives room for principles other than retributive. Moral elevation implies moral choice. But if the connection between character and fate were immutable - if righteousness necessarily and inevitably brought reward, and guilt necessarily and inevitably ended in ruin- then in so mechanical a life men would be forever choosing between prosperity and adversity, while there would be no opportunity for the higher choice between right and wrong. In Job, the Council in Heaven recognises that the unbroken prosperity of the patriarch has made it impossible to say whether his life is a life of true piety or of interested policy; it is only when unmerited calamities have overwhelmed him that Job can reveal his higher self with the cry, "Though he slay me, I will trust him." The three children of the Book of Daniel, confronting cruel persecution, believe indeed that their God can deliver them from the tyrant; but we feel them as rising to a higher moral plane when they go on to face the other alternative, "But if not, we will not bow down." 2 It is the exceptions to the universality of retribution that make the free atmosphere in which alone the highest morality can develop. Whether therefore we consider real life or life in the ideal, whether we review ancient tragedy or the literature of the Bible, we are led to the conclusion that a moral system revealed in dramatic plot must be expected to exhibit nemesis as a single aspect of providence, and not as its sole law. Now one of the 2 Daniel iii. 17-18. E 1 Job i. 9-10. principles underlying the exceptions to the universality of retribution, one of the forces that will be found to come between individual character and individual fate, is that which is expressed by the term Accident. I know that to many of my readers this word will be a stumbling block; those especially who are new to ethical studies are apt to consider that their philosophical reputation will be compromised if they consent to recognise the possibility of accidents. But such a feeling rests upon a confusion between physics and morals. In the physical world, which is founded upon universality and the sum of things, we make it a preliminary axiom that every event has a cause, known or yet to be discovered. But in the world of morals, where individual responsibility comes in, it is obvious that events must happen to individuals the causes of which are outside individual control. To take the simplest example. A number of persons, in the ordinary course of their daily life, enter a railway train; the train goes over an embankment into a river, and fifty of the occupants meet a violent and painful death. We call this, rightly, a railway accident.' It is true that, so far as the incident is a part of the physical world, there have been ample causes for all the effects there has been careless service, or undermining waters, and gravitation has done its proper work. But in the moral world of each individual who has thus perished there has been no causation; nothing these persons have done has caused the disaster, nothing left undone by them would have averted it; in the universe of their individual lives the incident remains an effect without a cause. A deed has here returned upon others than the doer ; whatever we may call it in physics, the event must be pronounced a moral accident. : The moral system of Shakespeare gives full recognition to accident as well as retribution; the interest of plot at one point is the moral satisfaction of nemesis, where we watch the sinner found out by his sin; it changes at another point to the not less moral sensation of pathos, our sympathy going out to the suffering which is independent of wrong doing. A notable illustration of the latter is the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this play Shakespeare engages our sympathies for two young and attractive lives, and proceeds to bring down upon them wave after wave of calamity, which come upon them not as the result of what Romeo and Juliet have done, but from accident and circumstances not within their control. Instead of wrong and retribution, we have in this case innocence and pathos. Here however a misconception must be avoided. To say that Romeo and Juliet are innocent is not the same thing as to say that they are perfect. No one cares to discuss whether these young souls had not their full share of original sin; nor is it relevant to inquire whether two different persons in their situation might or might not have acted differently. The essential point is that in the providential dispensations of Shakespeare's story, the tragedy overwhelming the lovers is brought about, not by error on their part, but by circumstances outside their control, by what is to them external accident. ry into three It is convenient to divide the course of the story stages there is the original entanglement of the secret marriage; there is the accession of entanglement in the banishment of Romeo; and there is the final tragedy of the fifth act. In each case we are to see the essential events happening, not through the sin or error of the hero or heroine, but through forces outside their personal will. It is, I suppose, an impertinence for grave analysis to pry into the merry mystery of boy and girl love; otherwise, I would remark that the mode in which Romeo and Juliet become attached to one another brings us close to the domain of the accidental. Some men walk into love with their eyes open, looking to the right and to the left, and above all looking behind to see that their retreat is open to the last moment. Others glide into love, yielding half consciously to an attraction as fundamental as gravitation. Yet others, by their phrase 'falling in love,' recognise suddenness and shock; an even higher degree of suddenness and shock is found in the social phenomenon of 'love at first sight.' Of course such love at first sight may, in some cases, be no more than the quickening, under favourable surroundings, of what would under other circumstances have come about more gradually. But what are we to say of the cases where the shock of a momentary meeting has reversed for two human beings the whole direction in which each of the lives has been tending? In the natural course of events Romeo and Juliet would never have met they belong to families bitterly at feud, and Romeo, moreover, is in love with a Rosaline, whose unrequiting coldness drives him to desperation. Accident must intervene in order to bring the two even to physical proximity. The Capulets are giving a dance, and the head of the house hands his servant a list of guests to be invited. The man does not tell his master that he cannot read writing, but, outside the house, must ask the first persons he meets to decipher the paper for him. By accident,1 the first persons he meets are a party of Montagues, Romeo amongst them; the name of Rosaline among those invited leads Romeo to accept a suggestion of a surprise mask. Yet at the door of the Capulet house so does our story quiver with the accidental Romeo is all but backing out; his heart is too heavy with Rosaline's unkindness for his heels to make merry; at last he goes forward for comradeship sake. Once inside, he is found risking his life to inquire whose is the beauty that has smitten him.2 O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheeks of night Juliet at first has not seen Romeo under his mask; the moment he has accosted her, her words speak the shock of helpless passion.3 If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding bed. An instant's encounter has reversed the whole current of two lives; Juliet's words emphasise this sudden 1 I. ii. 34-106; compare I. iv. 2 I. v. 47. reversal.* 8 I. v. 136. 4 I. v. 140. My only love sprung from my only hate! That I must love a loathed enemy. Is it overstraining to say that such reciprocal passion has come as an external shock into each separate life? Suppose the story had been so ordered that, at this ball of the Capulets, a thunderstorm had intervened, and Romeo and Juliet by two successive flashes had been instantly killed: would not every commentator have recognised a story of most remarkable accident, in spite of the existence of a science of electricity? Not less accidental than such lightning strokes has come the encounter which, in an instant affording no room for choice, has changed Romeo and Juliet from loathed hereditary foes into passionate lovers for life. But love is one thing, marriage another; it may be urged that, while Romeo and Juliet have without their consent been caught in the toils of passion, yet moral responsibility comes in with the further question, whether they shall yield to the passion or resist. We have to ask then, what just cause or impediment there is why these two lovers should not marry. Is it the impediment of parental objection? It might be a delicate matter to inquire how far parental opposition is a final barrier to the marriage of children; fortunately, Shakespeare has so moulded his story that this difficult question is entirely eliminated. The Montague's voice is recognised, and an attempt made to eject him from the Capulet house; the head of the house forbids this infraction of hospitable honour, and in the altercation' Juliet's father speaks thus of Romeo : He bears him like a portly gentleman; No higher testimonial could be given by any father to the worthiness of a suitor for his daughter's hand. It appears then that the 1 I. v. 56-90. |