Compare and contrast the Characters of Ariel and Caliban in The Tempest

Ariel

Nowhere in Shakespeare's plays are two more sharply contrasted

characters than Ariel and Caliban. Both are equally preternatural; Ariel is
the air spirit, Caliban the earth spirit. Ariel's very being is spun of melody
and fragrance; if a feeling soul and an intelligent will are the warp, these
are the woof of his exquisite texture. He has just enough of human-
heartedness to know how he would feel were he human, and a
proportionable sense of that gratitude which has been aptly called the
memory of the heart; hence he needs to be often reminded of his
obligations, but he is religiously true to them so long as he remembers
them. His delicacy of nature is nowhere more apparent than in his
sympathy with right and good; the instant he comes within their touch he
follows them without reserve, and he will suffer any torments rather than
"act the earthy and abhorr'd commands" that go against his moral grain.
And what a merry little personage he is withal; as if his being were cast
together in an impulse of play, and he would spend his whole life in one
perpetual frolic. Small wonder that Prospero calls him "my tricksy spirit," V,
i, 226. In his fondness for mischievous sport Ariel is strongly reminiscent of
Puck. With what gusto he relates the trick he played on Caliban and his
confederates, when they were proceeding to execute their conspiracy
against the hero's life:

I told you, sir, they were red-hot with drinking;

So full of valour that they smote the air
For breathing in their faces; beat the ground
For kissing of their feet; yet always bending
Towards their project. Then I beat my tabor;
At which, like unback'd colts, they prick'd their ears,
Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses
As they smelt music: so I charm'd their ears
That calf-like they my lowing follow'd through
Tooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns,
Which enter'd their frail shins: at last I left them
I' th' filthy-mantled pool beyond your cell.
There dancing up to th' chins. [IV, i, 171-183.]
But the main ingredients of Ariel's zephyr-like constitution are shown in his
leading inclinations, as he naturally has most affinity for that of which he is
framed. Moral ties are irksome to him; they are not his proper element
When he enters their sphere, he feels them to be holy mdeed, but, were he
free, he would keep out of their reach and follow the circling seasons in
their course, and always dwell merrily in the fringes of summer. Prospero
quietly intimates his instinctive dread of the cold by threatening to make
him "howl away twelve winters." And the chief joy of his promised release
from service is that he will then be free to live all the year through under the
soft rule of summer, with its flowers and fragrancies and melodies. He is
indeed an arrant little epicure of perfume and sweet sounds.

A markworthy feature of Ariel is that his power does not stop with the
physical forces of nature, but reaches also to the hearts and consciences of
men, so that by his music he can kindle or assuage the deepest griefs of
the one, and strike the keenest pangs of remorse into the other. This
comes out in the different effects of his art upon Ferdinand and the guilty
king, as related by the men themselves:

Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o' th' island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have found it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.
No, it begins again. [I, ii, 388-396.]
Such is the effect on Ferdinand; very different is the effect of Ariel's art
upon the king:
O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc'd
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass.
Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded; and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded.
And with him there lie mudded. [III, iii, 95-102.]
Ariel, too, has some of the magic potency of old god Cupid. It is through
some witchcraft of his that Ferdinand and Miranda are surprised into a
mutual rapture so that Prospero notes at once how "at the first sight they
have changed eyes," and "are both in either's power:" All which is indeed
just what Prospero wanted, yet he is startled at the result; that fine issue of
nature outruns his thought, and he takes care forthwith lest it work too fast:
This swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light. [I, ii, 451-453.]
Ariel's powers and functions entide him to be called Prospero's prime
minister. Through his agency Prospero's thoughts become things, his
volitions events. And yet, strangely and diversely as Ariel's nature is
elemented and composed, with touches akin to several orders of being,
there is such a self-consistency about him, he is so cut out in individual
distinctness, and so rounded in with personal attributes, that contemplation
freely and easily rests upon him as an object. He is by no means an
abstract idea personified, or any sort of intellectual diagram, but a veritable
person; and we have a personal feeling towards the dear creature, and
would fain knit him into the living circle of our human affections and make
him a familiar playfellow of the heart.

Caliban

If Caliban strikes us as a more wonderful creation than Ariel, it is probably

because he has more in common with us, without being in any proper
sense human. He represents, both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate
nature between man and brute. Though he has all the attributes of
humanity from the moral downwards, so that his nature touches and
borders upon the sphere of moral life, the result but approves his exclusion
from such life in that it brings him to recognize moral law only as making for
self. He has intelligence of seeming wrong in what is done to him, but no
conscience of what is wrong in his own doings. But the magical presence of
spirits has cast into the caverns of his brain some faint reflection of a better
world; he has taken in some of the epiphanies that throng the enchanted
island. It is a most singular and significant stroke in the delineation that
sleep seems to loosen the fetters of his soul and lift him above himself. It
seems as if in his passive state the voice of truth and good vibrated
down to his soul and stopped there, being unable to kindle any answering
tones within, so that in his waking hours they are to him but as the memory
of a dream:

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again. [III, ii, 133-139.]
Here is revealed the basal poetry in Caliban s nature, but it is significant
that when Prospero and Miranda seek to educate him the result is to
increase his grossness and malignity of disposition. Schlegel compares his
mind to a dark cave into which the light of knowledge falling neither
illuminates nor warms, but only serves to put in motion the poisonous
vapors generated there.

Caliban's most remarkable characteristic is the perfect originality of his

thoughts and manners. Though his disposition is framed of grossness and
malignity, there is nothing vulgar or commonplace about him. His whole
character is developed from within, not impressed from without, the effect
of Prosperous instructions having been to make him all the more himself,
and there being perhaps no soil in his nature for conventional vices and
knaveries to take root and grow in. Hence the almost classic dignity of his
behavior compared with that of the drunken sailors. In his simplicity,
indeed, he at first mistakes them for gods who "bear celestial liquor," and
they wax merry enough at the "credulous monster," but in his vigor of
thought and purpose he soon conceives a scorn of their childish interest in
trinkets and gewgaws, and the savage of the woods seems nobility itself
beside the savages of the city.