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Really there is only one figure, a protean one, in the realm of practical life, to whom the poet may look to save his reputation. Shakespeare he is privileged to represent as following many callings, and adorning them all.
Of all the protean forms of misery that meet us in the bosom of that "stony-hearted stepmother, London," there is none that appeals so directly to our sympathies as the spectacle of a destitute child.
Protean divinity that no image could completely describe, here she leaps suddenly forth, like a fountain in the midst of a desert, to disappear after having given birth to an ephemeral oasis; there she returns at regular intervals, collecting and scattering, like migratory birds that obey the rhythm of the seasons.
At one time the doctors think she has an attack of heart disease, at another time they imagine it is some affection of the liver, and at another they declare it to be a disease of the spine. To-day this protean malady, that assumes a thousand forms and a thousand modes of attack, is attributed to the stomach, which is the great caldron and regulator of the body. This is why we have come here.
My memories of what occurred invariably take the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean fear, I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us, and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under us and sucked at our heels.
For these elements have a true part to perform here, as in Lear and other plays; they come in, not merely as subsidiary to the 'artistic effect' not merely because their wild Titanic play forms an imposing harmonious accompaniment to the play of the human passions and their 'wildness' but as a grand scientific exhibition of the element which the Poet is pursuing under all its Protean forms as a most palpable and effective exhibition to the sense of that identical thing against which he has raised his eternal standard of revolt, refusing to own, under any name, its mastery.
'No, don't show us any further, William! said his sister. 'It is too tragic. De Stancy put away the sword, himself rather excited not, however, by his own recital, but by the direct gaze of Paula at him. This Protean quality of De Stancy's, by means of which he could assume the shape and situation of almost any ancestor at will, had impressed her, and he perceived it with a throb of fervour.
She walked away, and seemed intently watching the sea, of whose protean face she never wearied; and, puzzled and tantalized, Dr. Grey turned to examine the unfinished picture. It represented an almost colossal woman, kneeling under an apple-tree, with her folded hands lifted towards a setting sun that glared from purple hills, across waving fields of green and golden grain.
The heathen were oppressed and angered, their rights abridged and defied; they saw the Christians triumphant at every point, and hatred is a protean monster which rages most fiercely and most venomously when it has lurked in the foul career of envy.
It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to destroy the Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles alive, after the reaction of 1815: a Protean institution, whose power we in England are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent were apt, during the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it.
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