Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853. Various
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that the mistake should have remained so long uncorrected;" and he intimates that they who have found any meaning in checks, have done so only because, through ignorance, they could find no meaning in ethics.
Hence it becomes necessary for those who do find a meaning in checks, to defend that meaning; and hence I undertake to answer Mr. Collier's question.
Aristotle's checks are those moral adjustments that form the distinguishing feature of his philosophy.
They are the eyes of reason, whereby he would teach man to avoid divergence from the straight path of happiness.
They are his moderators, his mediocrities, his metriopathics.
They are his philosophical steering-marks, his moral guiding-lines, whereby the passions are to be kept in the via media; as much removed from total abnegation on the one hand, as from immoderate indulgence on the other.
Virtue, according to Aristotle, consists in checked or adjusted propensities. Our passions are not in themselves evil, except when unchecked by reason. And inasmuch as we may overeat, or underfeed ourselves (the check being temperance), so may we suffer our other propensities to deviate from the juste milieu, either in the direction of indulgence or of privation.
The art of adjusting the passions requires an apprenticeship to virtue. The end to be attained is the establishment of good habits. These good habits, like any other skill, can only be attained by practice. Therefore the practice of virtue is the education of the passions.
Ethics is the doctrine of habits; but habits may be good or bad. When good, they constitute virtue; when bad, licentiousness.
The doctrine of checks is that branch of ethics which teaches moral adjustment and restraint.
Therefore checks and licentiousness are in better antithesis to each other, than ethics can be to either, because ethics includes both.
The Aristotelian idea of adjustment, rather than denial, of the passions, is well illustrated in the following passage from Plutarch's Morall Vertue, by Philemon Holland, a contemporary of Shakspeare:
"For neither do they shed and spill the wine upon the floure who are afraide to be drunke, but delay the same with water: nor those who feare the violence of a passion, do take it quite away, but rather temper and qualifie the same: like as folke use to breake horses and oxen from their flinging out with their heeles, their stiffenes and curstnes of the head, and stubburnes in receiving the bridle or the yoke, but do not restraine them of other motions of going about their worke and doing their deede. And even so, verily, reason maketh good use of these passions, when they be well tamed, and, as it were, brought to hand: without overweakening or rooting out cleane that parte of the soule which is made for to second reason and do it good service.... Whereas let passions be rid cleane away (if that were possible to be done), our reason will be found in many things more dull and idle: like as the pilot and master of a ship hath little to do if the winde be laid and no gale at all stirring … as if to the discourse of reason the gods had adjoined passion as a pricke to incite, and a chariot to set it forward."
Again, in describing the "Meanes," he says—
"Now to begin with Fortitude, they say it is the meane between Cowardise and rash Audacitie; of which twaine the one is a defect, the other an excesse of the yrefull passion: Liberalitie, betweene Nigardise and Prodigalitie: Clemencie and Mildnesse, betweene senselesse Indolence and Crueltie: Justice, the meane of giving more or lesse than due: Temperance, a mediocritie betweene the blockish stupiditie of the minde, moved with no touch of pleasure, and all unbrideled loosenes, whereby it is abandoned to all sensualitie."– The Philosophie of Plutarch, fol. 1603.
It really does appear to me that there could not be a happier or more appropriate designation, for a philosophy made up in this way of "meanes" and adjustments, so as to steer between the plus and minus, than a system of checks—not fixed, or rigid rules, as they are sometimes interpreted to be, but nice allowances of excess or defect, to be discovered, weighed, and determined by individual reason, in the audit of each man's conscience, according to the strength or weakness of the passions he may have to regulate.
I therefore oppose the substitution of ethics—
1. Because we have the primâ facie evidence of the text itself, that checks was Shakspeare's word.
2. Because we have internal evidence, in the significance and excellence of the phrase, that it was Shakspeare's word.
Ethics was the patent title by which Aristotle's moral philosophy was universally known; therefore any ignoramus, who never dipped beyond the title, might, and would, have used it. But no person, except one well read in the philosophy itself, would think of giving it such a designation as checks; which word, nevertheless, is most happily characteristic of it.
3. Because, as before stated, Aristotle's checks, being the restrictive and regulating portion of Aristotle's Ethics, is necessarily a more diametrical antithesis to Ovid (and his laxities).
4. Because I look upon the use of this phrase as one of those nice and scarcely perceptible touches by which Shakspeare was content rather to hint at, than to disclose his knowledge,—one of those effects whereby he makes a single word supply the place of a treatise.
With these opinions, I cannot but look upon this threatened change of checks into ethics, as wholly unwarrantable, and I now protest against it as earnestly as, upon a former occasion, I did against the alteration of sickles into shekels, or, still worse, into cycles or into circles. It is with great satisfaction I compare four different views taken of this word by Mr. Collier, viz.—in the note to the text of his octavo edition of Shakspeare;—in an additional note in vol. i., page cclxxxiv. of that edition;—in the first announcement of his annotated folio in the Athenæum newspaper, Jan. 31st, 1852,—and finally (after my remarks upon the word in "N. & Q."), his virtual reinstatement of the original sickle (till then supposed a palpable and undeniable misprint) at page 46. of Notes and Emendations, together with the production, suo motu, of an independent reference in support of my position.
To return to this present substitution of ethics for checks, a very singular circumstance connected with it is the ignoring, by both Mr. Collier and by the critic in the Gentleman's Magazine, of Sir William Blackstone's original claim to the suggestion, by prior publication of upwards of half a century. At that time, notwithstanding the great learning and acuteness of the proposer, the alteration was rejected! And shall we now be less wise than our fathers? Shall we—misled by the prestige of a few drops of rusty ink fashioned into letters of formal cut—place implicit credence in emendations whose only claim to faith, like that of the Mormon scriptures, is that nobody knows whence they came?
In the passage I have quoted from Philemon Holland, there may be observed two peculiarities which are generally supposed to be exclusively Shakspearian: one is the beautiful application of the word "touch"—the other the phrase "discourse of reason." Where this last expression occurs in Hamlet, it narrowly escaped emendation at the hands of Gifford! (See Mr. Knight's note, in his illustrated edition of Shakspeare.) It is the true Aristotelian διάνοια.
There is also a third peculiarity of expression in the same quotation, in the use of the word delay in the sense of diluere, to dilute, temper, allay. There are at least two passages in Shakspeare's plays where the word is used in this sense, but which appear to have been overlooked by his glossarists. The first is in All's Well that Ends Well, Act IV. Sc. 3., where the French locals are moralising upon Bertram's profligate pursuit of Diana:
"Now God delay our rebellion—as we are ourselves, what are we?"
The second is in Cymbeline, Act V. Sc. 4., where Jupiter tempers his love with crosses, in order to make his gifts—
"The more delayed, delighted."
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