SHAKESPEARE AND PSYCHOGNOSIS 69 



tale Gonzalo is a deep rejoicer. Not one word of his suggests that he ever considers 

 his own troubles or pleasures. His words are not only gentle, they are reverent 

 and inspired with awe for the unseen, faith in the future, deep respect for whatever 

 is of good report. Once he lets us see that contemporary manners are not gentle- 

 kind, yet he would soften them by example rather than precept. 



Adrian is his friend. Sebastian and Antonio hate him past reason. They 

 really have no charge against him except garrulity; yet they would kill him that 

 "Sir Prudence" should not afterwards upbraid their course. Alonso accepts his 

 services with dignified courtesy, occasionally showing a slight impatience of his 

 tediousness. Ariel sings to him as he sleeps, and wakes him to renewed vigilance. 

 Miranda says, on hearing how he had assisted her father in the earlier tempest 

 and preserved the learned works: " Would I might but ever see that man!" Pros- 

 pero speaks of him repeatedly, and always in words of the most sterHng respect and 

 affection. What greater praise can Prospero give than that which he solemnly 

 utters in the significant words, " My true preseiver ! " 



To draw the facts thus accumulated together into a statement true of them all 

 is not difficult. Gonzalo is not a complex character; the clearness of the type 

 together with the absence of self-asserliveness may have made Gonzalo seem of 

 small consequence in the plot. But the evidence of Prospero as to his positive 

 worth is conclusive. Gonzalo is an unselfish man. He is a living concrete example 

 of the hearty acceptance of the golden rule of Uving with ideal kindness and for- 

 bearance in a selfish world. He does not unite a powerful head with his excellent 

 heart, but he is on this account only a clearer and simpler example of one of the 

 two great factors in human relations — unselfishness. If the common estimate of 

 the critics regarding Gonzalo seems to agree rather with that of Antonio than with 

 that of Prospero, the presumption is that their estimate is not Shakespearean and 

 that it has not been arrived at by careful induction but rather by attaching undue 

 importance to the chaff of the villains in the third scene. Gonzalo's quiet, conserva- 

 tive efficiency is a cause of Prospero's learning, and hence of Prospero's magic 

 power. Gonzalo is the type of all that is meant by pure unselfishness in human 

 society.^ 



Antonio, a Type of Intellectual Egoism 



Antonio appears in the same scenes as Gonzalo. His first words are " Where 

 is the Master, boson?" — a repetition of the King's question; but Antonio does 

 not tell the boatswain to have care, or to play the man. His second speech is, " Hang, 

 cur, hang! You whoreson, insolent noisemaker, we are less afraid to be drowned 

 than thou art." Later he says, " We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards." 

 But in fact it appears that the sailors used skill and that no blame attached to them. 

 " This wide-chapped rascal — would thou might'st He drowning the washing 



* It seems to me that Moulton's fine study of the Tempest loses the quest mainly through ignoring the 

 unobtrusive greatness of this talkative old man. 



