"Pausing a moment on the outer edge, Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light The dark exterior desert,--hast thou strength Beloved, to look behind us to the gate? _Eve_--Have I not strength to look up to thy face?"
This story of _Janet's Repentance_ offers us, by the way, a strong note of modernness as between George Eliot and Shakspeare. Shakspeare has never drawn, so far as I know, a repentance of any sort. Surely, in the whole range of our life, no phenomenon can take more powerful hold upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human spirit suddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole current of its love and desire from a certain direction into a direction entirely opposite; so that from a small spiteful creature, enamored with all ugliness, we have a large, generous spirit, filled with the love of true love. In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlingly near to the essential mystery of personality--to that hidden fountain of power not preceded, power not conditioned, which probably gives man his only real conception of Divine power, or power acting for itself. It would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passion comprehended in the situation of repentance had not attracted Shakspeare's imagination, if one did not remember that the developing personality of man was then only coming into literature. The only apparent change of character of this sort in Shakspeare which I recall is that of the young king Henry V. leaving Falstaff and his other gross companions for the steadier matters of war and government; but the soliloquy of Prince Hal in the very first act of King Henry IV. precludes all idea of repentance here, by showing that at the outset his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he is calculatingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole apparent dissipation is but a scheme to enhance his future glory. In the first act of Henry IV. (first part), when the plot is made to rob the carriers, at the end of Scene II., _exeunt_ all but Prince Hal, who soliloquizes thus:
"I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. ... So when this loose behaviour I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which had no foil to set it off. I'll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will."