“The choice of Hercules”

“The choice of Hercules” is Camden Farebrother’s allusion to a classical moral fable, used to question its comforting simplicity. He contrasts the story’s easy-looking heroic decision with the prolonged pressures that can wear down a person’s resolve, making the reference a compact expression of his own sense of weakness and of the forces that shape conduct.

The Allusion and Its Reversal

Speaking to Tertius Lydgate, Farebrother calls the choice “a pretty fable” and argues that its hero is made to seem as though an initial decision were sufficient. He sets that clean emblem of choice against another story: Hercules comes to hold the distaff and eventually wears the Nessus shirt. The movement from heroic resolve to compromised, burdened existence unsettles the fable’s apparent lesson. Choosing rightly is not, Farebrother suggests, the same as remaining unaltered by what follows.

Farebrother’s Self-Assessment

The allusion is personal as well as argumentative. Farebrother admits that the world has proved too strong for him and says he is not a mighty man destined for renown. His reflection turns the classical example into a measure of the distance between an admired ideal and his own limited capacity to sustain it. The reference does not present him as untouched by moral choice; rather, it shows him judging his failures without claiming heroic stature.

Resolve and Social Circumstance

Farebrother’s final qualification shifts attention from individual will to the conditions around it: one good resolve might keep a person right if everyone else’s resolve helped him. The image therefore resists a simple account of virtue as a solitary act of will. Moral steadiness depends partly on whether other people support it, and the fable’s heroic model looks inadequate when set against that social pressure. The allusion distills the novel’s contrast between an exemplary choice imagined in isolation and the difficult persistence required in ordinary life.