Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Would make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me: when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.
This is not more beautiful than it is true. The poet here shows us
the savage with the simplicity of a child, and makes the strange
monster amiable. Shakespeare had to paint the human animal rude and
without choice in its pleasures, but not without the sense of
pleasure or some germ of the affections. Master Barnardine in
Measure for Measure, the savage of civilized life, is an admirable
philosophical counterpart to Caliban.
Shakespeare has, as it were by design, drawn off from Caliban the
elements of whatever is ethereal and refined, to compound them in
the unearthly mould of Ariel. Nothing was ever more finely conceived
than this contrast between the material and the spiritual, the gross
and delicate. Ariel is imaginary power, the swiftness of thought
personified. When told to make good speed by Prospero, he says, 'I
drink the air before me.' This is something like Puck's boast on a
similar occasion, 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty
minutes.' But Ariel differs from Puck in having a fellow-feeling in
the interests of those he is employed about.
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