When Portia's heart unties the spasm of joy that tightened round it at Bassanio's choice, it beats again with the grave and sweet dignity that is as native to heras her playful wit. Her mind recognizes the serious change that must befall her fortune: in the first moment of it there comes a deep humility that makes her speech kneel at the feet of the man whom she will marry. For her great superiority is free from the taint of conceit, save "a noble and a true conceit of godlike amity."
We sometimes discover that gifted women are over-consciously aware of the effect which they produce. While we admire the iris on the peacock's neck, a bridling runs through it as if to set the colors in a better light, and our attention is divided by the motion. The orator's greatest gift is self-absorption. It strips his person to clothe his thought. His morals seem to gather luminosity out of the air, to become visible to men. The moment that the speaker listens to his own words, and snatches time between them to make the audience captive to his little private ovation, the people are less absorbed, begin to study the cut of his garments, and nod to each other how well they fit. Then the thought that was beginning to condense goes back like Ariel to the elements. When a woman's excellence reads on our faces that it is delightful, and begins also to be delighted, it throws a shadow: as we stand in it she seems less chaste than we thought her. All of Portia's talents share the inviolable reserve of her person, which seems to convey its modesty into the unspoken thought. How adorable is her humility!—
"You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,... an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd:Happy in this, she is not yet so oldBut she may learn; and happier than this,She is not bred so dull but she can learn;Happiest of all, in that her gentle spiritCommits itself to yours to be directed,As from her lord, her governor, her king."
Does this language seem to you slavish and old-fashioned? And do you, madam, declare that you never saw the man yet for whom you would so demean yourself? Then I shall know that just at present you are not in love. Perhaps you never have been; for it is the perfect language of a woman's first hours which follow love's declaration, when she feels that her life and soul are to be made complete by marriage. She storms herself with questions never before suggested. What could he see in her? What has she got with which to repay this exquisite flattery, this shuddering delight at being summoned out of millions of her sex? The first impulse is to spill the soul in a libation to the deity of the hour: let the whole of it drench my lover; let me not dare to reserve a portion to teach me a first selfish lesson. All, all is yours, my king! Come, drain it at the chalice of my lips!
An emotion far shallower than this is quite enough in any age to trump up a marriage with; but it is a funeral bak'd meat growing colder still at the wedding-breakfast. It is often frozen stiff before it gets there. Half-ripened girls fancy that their simmering preference will have the sun-burst of love; but the blossom is still in its sheath: when it matures, that first greenness is pushed off. But, if it was rubbed off, the blossom, exposed to unseasonable air, grows rusty, and lifts up a vapid invitation to some splendor to nod and mingle sweets. Shakspeare has no language of conventional avowal: no acceptances that are inspired by respect, calculation, immaturity, acquaintanceship, water his page with insipidity. His pen is love's shaft, and always has somebody's blood upon the tip.
So do not include Portia's sublime deference in your modern programme of reform. Man would grow less worthy of woman, less obedient to her inspirations, if that fell into disrepute. It is the first unstudied stratagem of love,—one that so humbles man into a greater deference that she can no longer call him lord. She listens in turn to his emotion: every line lifts her into equality, with the gesture that kings make when they acknowledge:—
"Madam, you have bereft me of all words,Only my blood speaks to you in my veins;And there is such confusion in my powers,As after some oration, fairly spokeBy a beloved prince, there doth appearAmong the buzzing pleased multitude;Where every something, being blent together,Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,Express'd, and not express'd."
This is the quality in Shakspeare's courtships which convinces us that all his marriages will turn out happily. And he makes it plain in all his plays that he is a devotee of marriage. Portia is quite competent to lead a single life, and might earn a brilliant living if fate stripped her of wealth. Being without a particle of ambition, she would have to be driven by poverty intosetting up housekeeping with her gifts. But no woman is fine enough to persuade Nature to grant her exemption from the pain of love. There will always be exceptions,—an Olympia Morata, a Cassandra Fédélé, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara Barton,—natures of great constancy, who are absorbed in scholarship, poesy, or good works, with a temperament that has an even graciousness toward all men, and just pauses short of honoring one exclusively. Or, perhaps, the genius of such women was the gradual rally of time around an early disappointment, whose story never will be told, when something baffled a first love,—as the pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign substance that has intruded into its retreat, slowly coats it all over with nacre, till beauty incorporates the secret ill. Man covets it, but can never fix the date when the trouble of a fine soul began to revenge itself so nobly.
Still, it gives us pleasure when the best gifts are surprised, captured, seized away to consecrate privacy and become a fount of noble inheritance. Their publicity shall thrill and elevate a later age.
"When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, you seek for the lofty spring of nobleness, and find it far off in the dear breast of some mother, who melted the snows of winter, and condensed the summer's dew into fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man in all the city streets."
Or if, in middle life, some truth, some moral, claims a woman's hand, and offers second marriage, men will gladly listen to a tone whose grave, sweet temper,pitched by first love and married happiness, pervades all her experience.
So Portia, who could, when it was needed, "turn two mincing steps into a manly stride," doffs the lawyer's robe, and, returning, is met by music and conducted to a palace that was not till then a home.
FOOTNOTES:[18]Sometimes in Shakspeare the wordfancymeans a genuine passion: here it hints only at a passing sentiment.
FOOTNOTES:
[18]Sometimes in Shakspeare the wordfancymeans a genuine passion: here it hints only at a passing sentiment.
[18]Sometimes in Shakspeare the wordfancymeans a genuine passion: here it hints only at a passing sentiment.
HELENA; OPHELIA.
HELENA.
Thecharacter of Helena, in "All's Well that Ends Well," furnishes a striking contrast to Ophelia, and tempts the student of Shakspeare to bring both types of womanhood into one field of view. Ophelia loves the Lord Hamlet, who is her "expectancy and rose of the fair state,"—one to be proud of, cling to, and adore. But, when her father's interference begins to draw her into the contrary current which sweeps her life away, she develops no power of resistance. Even her love is not strong enough to stem the stream that rushes suddenly from subterranean caves to cover her feet and climb to her heart. She has no will for withstanding her father's resolution: her passion has not yet ventured out of its girlish stage, to gather strength and be a threat to her docility. She submissively returns the Prince's cherished words and presents, lets the old father rule her, and goes crazed.
But Helena, though also loving one above her rank, being only a physician's daughter, cannot bear the idea of giving up Count Bertram. Her love is not at first returned; but she contains love enough to furnish both hearts, and she actually follows him to court, to make a captive of him, hoping to light a mutual flame. Such a procedure as that stood not within the capacity of Ophelia. No doubt it offends our conventional feeling;so that Helena must not only succeed, but manifest pure and noble qualities on the strange road she takes toward success, if she would gain our sympathy. The play begins quite early to canvass for our favor by showing that she is a noble woman who proceeds thus, and it is in the interest of a love that intends to be pure and legal. It is death to be without Bertram; and love will dare all things, risk life itself, to save the life of love. Why not in a woman as well as in a man? Nay, more likely in her case, for that special reason of womanhood, that positive instinct to be dependent, and to find life at once swallowed up and blessed by something or some person outside of Self. A modern woman, who desires to be independent, is eager to find something upon which she may depend. The Self of the average woman does not really subsist and reach perfect consciousness until the lover makes the claim of another Self upon it. For that which at first appears to be a threat of absorption, annihilation of the individual, turns out to be the bliss of being rendered back. It is only by the loss of mere individuality that an immortal person is established.
What kind of a woman is this one who sallies forth to turn a man into a husband? Shakspeare endows her with natural traits so positive that they claim no repose, are contented with no proficiency, and continually project improvement. "Her dispositions she inherits, which make fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with pity, they are virtues and traitors too; in her they arethe better for their simpleness; she derives her honesty, and achieves her goodness." That is to say, not content with being well-born into an amiable disposition, she meditates the career of character. Such a mind allied with purity justifies itself, and can venture behavior which a weak person would be wrecked upon; in whom, therefore, the attempt would be culpable. Conventional manners are the haven within whose break-water the weak ride at safety, where nothing tests and strains their shallow build. When Helena goes to court on the pretext that the King's malady can be cured by a prescription that her dying father confided to her, the King, who prefers male doctors, puts her off and under-values her capacity; but she persists with a sincerity so sparkling, a tone so prompt and clear, a will so hard to repulse, that the King perceives no ordinary woman:—
"Methinks, in thee some blessed spirit doth speakHis powerful sound within an organ weak:And what impossibility would slayIn common sense, sense saves another way.Thy life is dear; for all that life can rateWorth name of life, in thee hath estimate,Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, honor, allThat happiness and prime can happy call."
So this ennobled daughter of a doctor aspires to wed the noble son of a countess. Shakspeare attacks the social etiquette of his own age and of all secluded circles. Helena should be filled with grief for the father lately dead; but her "imagination carries no favor in it, but only Bertram's."
"I am undone: there is no living, none,If Bertram be away. It were all one,That I should love a bright, particular star,And think to wed it, he is so above me:In his bright radiance and collateral lightMust I be comforted, not in his sphere."
Then she gives a touch of woman's petulance at being so ensnared:—
"'Twas pretty, though a plague,To see him every hour; to sit and drawHis arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,In my heart's table,—heart too capableOf every line and trick of his sweet favor."
How frank and strong is the expression of her love! The lines are chiselled by a delicate distinctness: they suggest her profile. The verse has the high instep of a woman who can be haughty enough to crush the blossoms of this new, surprising sentiment.
She does not half listen to the gossip of Parolles. It is the absent Bertram who is drawing her thoughts to wander in the distance, to be in imagination for him
"A thousand loves,His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,His faith, his sweet disaster."
It is a pity "that wishing well had not a body in 't."
Now as Parolles departs, saying, "Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee," Helena shows us the originality of her character by compelling love, that is usually of a habit so timid and retiring, to put it off and become adventurous. She chides the weakness of sitting still to mope and be macerated by passion. Something must be done to justify and consecrate it, to vindicate Nature's scope: she already claims Bertramby divine sanction of her feeling. No matter whether he knows it or not, she knows he is that other part of her which her clear soul misses; and Fate shall not be pardoned if it leaves her less whole and rounded than she ought to be. Hitherto she is but half a person, and that half is disabled at the discovery. Love fills her with this rebuke of incompleteness, till she cannot tolerate thus being half-born into the world. When love takes hold of such determined minds, who are capable of willing and well endowed to confirm the will in action, the feminine traits acquire a bravery which inspires an invention not inconsistent with womanhood. She must find some way to reach the court, and put love's halo round his person: perhaps it will be absorbed and mingle with his blood. When the heart pronounces strongly, its meaning is sure to gather on the countenance and lend to conduct the purple of victory. So Helena will not have a secret, to prey like a worm upon the damask buds of all her youth. "Fortune," she said, "was no goddess, that had put such difference betwixt their two estates; love, no god, that would not extend his might only where qualities were level." She will not risk leaving the business to Heaven, and sit half made up till Providence may by chance observe her plight.
"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lieWhich we ascribe to Heaven: the fated skyGives us free scope; only, doth backward pullOur slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.Impossible be strange attempts to thoseThat weigh their pains in sense, and do supposeWhat hath been cannot be."
Still, with all this venturesome disposition to help the piecing-out of destiny, she is a true woman, who must relapse from the boldest project into the secret humility of loving, and of looking up to the orb around which the heart revolves. And how honest she is! for she had a father whose "skill was almost as great as his honesty." So she acknowledges her passion to Bertram's mother, as if to let us see that her action is not a plot, and her motive nothing short of womanly.
"I follow him notBy any token of presumptuous suit;Nor would I have him, till I do deserve him;Yet never know how that desert should be.... Thus, Indian-like,Religious in mine error, I adoreThe sun, that looks upon his worshipper,But knows of him no more."
In this admirable scene, the Countess does not repel, but rather seems to undertake the part of Nature's good-will for any love that is real enough and full enough for two.
"Even so it was with me when I was young:If we are Nature's, these are ours; this thornDoth to our rose of youth rightly belong:Our blood to us, this to our blood is born;It is the show and seal of Nature's truth,Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth."
Nature is not a member of society, and pays small heed to the prescriptions of a set. She does not ponder dowries and settlements, nor hunt up the title-deeds of clothes and houses; and does not snuff up the wedding-breakfast across the sacrament that mixes the blood of two hearts.
"Strange is it, that our bloodsOf color, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,Would quite confound distinction, yet stand offIn differences so mighty:... Good aloneIs good without a name."
It has not yet occurred to Bertram that Helena entertains for him an affection which he might duplicate. When he departs for the court, he only says to her, "The best wishes that can be forged in your thoughts be servants to you," little conscious how implicitly they would serve her. His soul is preoccupied with the image of Maud, the fair daughter of Lafeu.
"I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heartDurst make too bold a herald of my tongue."
Beyond her beauty there stretched a long perspective of contempt for all other women. Maud was too near to him, and blocked up the outlets of each eye, that no glances might get forth to scour the region which was so fruitful with Helena, to forage for her heart and gather it,—
"Thence it came,That she, whom all men prais'd, and whom myself,Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eyeThe dust that did offend it."
He is at first superior in rank and inferior in nature, his blood and virtue contending for empire in him. She is still the woman whom Nature has elected for him, notwithstanding his surprise and contempt when she summons him out of the crowd of courtiers in pursuance of the boon she had craved of the King, if he recovered by the use of her prescriptions. In her the voice ofNature spoke more truly than Bertram's passing inclination. As she claims the precious fee, the blushes in her cheeks whisper,—
"We blush that thou shouldst choose: but, be repuls'd,Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever;We'll ne'er come there again."
Bertram feigns compliance with the wishes of the King; but, determining to get rid of her, he hurries from the marriage rite to the Florentine wars. There was a technical marriage of two persons who are not yet wedded, for he does not yet deserve her. The shadow of her plebeian origin is large enough to obscure her merit; so that poetic justice requires that he must wait till she is appreciated, when he will find that he has gained every thing in yielding every thing to the supremacy of pure womanhood. He flings himself away to the wars, exclaiming, "Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France."
When she perceives that she is the cause of his expatriation, her decision is made to leave France, so that he may be free to enter it again. She becomes a pilgrim, with bared feet, to do penance for ambitious love, wandering here and there, keeping out of the way that he may be recalled from the dangers of war:—
"He is too good and fair for death and me;Whom I myself embrace, to set him free."
By and by, Bertram, believing that she is dead, is overwhelmed with an access of love for her. His awakened conviction "cries to see what's done." Supposing that she is departed, he finds that she is for the first time present. Although he has been full of faults, and does not hesitate to screen himself by the most ungentlemanly prevarications, there is a strain of his nature that sounded when he thought that death had snapped her string. The vibration woke the tone of Helena, and married him to her without a priest save death. "Sweet Helen's knell" became the joy-peals of her marriage morn. Then he receives his true patent of nobility; for her soul converts him to a man.
In this play, Shakspeare has followed the incidents of an old story; but, in doing so, Helena grew upon his hands to be so fine that we dislike to see her submit to a certain one of the circumstances of that borrowed plot. And we wonder that Shakspeare should not have shielded her by a better invention.
We are not satisfied to know that such incidents were very common in the novels of that day, whence Shakspeare derived many of his plots; for the greatest moments of his genius have taught us reverently to demand of him more than that he should be content to take the old threads and weave the old strand over. We expect to follow them as clews that lead through subtle labyrinths of Nature where the heart has stored its secrets. Whenever we venture with him on that raft of some light tale of Boccaccio, we are not surprised if we drop into deep water whose cresting waves admonish Shakspeare to brace and fortify the slim float he started on. We do not relish the idea that Shakspeare is mainly interested to work out a plot into a good acting play, and so takes the nearest coarse things that may suit such a purpose. It is true they have been immersed till they are encrusted all over with his imagination, and their cheapness is concealed. The Chinese drop a shot into the shell of a pearl oyster, and by and by reclaim it all cased in an iris. It seems to be a drop distilled from many sunsets; but the kernel is still a shot. Shakspeare dips the coarse narratives of the Italian writers into his many-colored verse; and they are turned into necklaces to heave on the breath of fair women, and signet-rings to stamp the sense and sovereignty of manhood. But we expect of Shakspeare something more than cunning ornament. The splendor of his poetry does not dazzle us so that we cannot look for hidden meanings and transcendent allusions to the soul of things, as we so often find in him.
But in her character Shakspeare clearly rose to a conviction that love may put such emphasis upon a woman that she must declare herself, notwithstanding the tradition of the sex, that the man's love must have the opening word. Yet, upon reflection, have not women always spoken before men ask them? The shyest and most timorous heart that scuds to covert at every rustle of discovery has already put man upon its track. Some conniving hour has dropped a softer tone into the voice which she never heard from her own tongue before. It surprises her into a faint blush, and surprises him into a sudden observation; as when a new planet steps into the field of view, and startles the watcher with one more world. It was but a blush's shadow,such as a bubble drops on the bed of a clear brook; but it goes athwart his eyes. As they look whence it came, he sees it has already pulled down the lids of hers and set them for a snare. She has spoken: she has made a declaration. With all the enterprise of Helena, she could not have advertised herself more fully.
There are many dialects and methods of expression; and every woman will instinctively pronounce her mother-tongue. From Viola to Helena stretches a whole chromatic scale of tones which do not transcend the holding bars. Helena was not a type anticipating some future of an inverted relation of the sexes, when, perhaps, evensevenwomen might have Scripture for laying hold of one man. But she bravely testifies of woman the faculty of a love so sacred, and improvised by a heart so firm and true, so inspired with its own destiny, that she perceives through a man's indifference what a man so often perceives through hers, through a firmament barred by sullen cloud-racks, the clear heaven that will be corresponsive to the heart. Helena cannot be daunted by the weather. While the storm lasts, the upper blue is confided to her keeping against the next fine day. But we shall see Ophelia cower beneath the broken roof of reason, while the heart is too weak to shore it up against the wild pother that is breaking round her.
OPHELIA.
Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, we descry the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on thehorizon a symmetry, enticing depth, weird masses, and a lonely top. We try to recognize the distinctions of this grand object which has been lifted there for ever to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be minutely pictured: the shadows that apprise us of its deep seclusion veil the openings of paths by which it is to be explored. Stretches of a livelier color report to us the verdure and perfume of youth: the clouds that fling their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued by gladness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly to sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe and vague surmise. Whither will those rifts lead us? Into what places visited by nothing human, whence we hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an adjuration which overtook, beneath the ground, our feet? What various latitudes are repeated along that height, with a zone for every season! It is shaped by all the weathers of the year: it groups within itself the smiles, the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them into a distance of sublime effect.
While we are observing it, there grows thither, as if deposited out of the day, a softening tint; one hardly knows if it be light, or color, or a vapor, or how it be compounded of them all. But it envelops the whole outline, and spills over into every opening, a gracious refinement, an investiture not easily described, a light touch of gentle qualities which decline to be quoted in the dry list of the appraiser. It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remoteness of it,—the impalpable Ophelia. To detain and handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx-moth, the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is motionless as a stain of color, restful as a summer afternoon when all the noises sleep: she is a sentiment that broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet; she gives no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable to goad her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. But this shyness is broad enough to cover Hamlet's variety all over, and does not let one of his features straggle beyond its subduing purple. She is the tone of the whole wide landscape that stretches between your soul and his. What need has she to multiply words, to intensify her shape upon the background of the action? Small need has she to borrow the saucy wit of Beatrice, to make up her lips with the pertness of Rosalind, or compress them with the firmness of Helena. They just suit the touch of Hamlet's lips when his unbend from gathering the speech of solemn thoughts. She offers them, and his cloud empties of its density. She draws off the accumulated sparks of reason, makes him safe and domestic, steals into him with content that even he cannot measure, up to the time when a father's death untuned his prophetic soul. She will learn to prattle about flowers, but, alas! not steeped like Perdita, in glad midsummer; not to beguile her lord, but to deck the bride-bed of her fate. She wears her rue "with a difference." But, in the mean time, she may neglect Lord Hamlet's books, and keep her mind guiltless of entertaining views. She would have no fancy for going toschool of Portia, perhaps no taste to learn the "neat cookery" of Imogen. Her hands are well fashioned to soothe the hours when "the pale cast of thought" wishes to escape from itself into some fair, open nature, and to feel its flattery. Because she is not a character, she is a tune: she is
"That old and antique song we heard last night."
The waters will soon pull "the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death." So, for a while, let her be the mood she is, the sentiment that Heaven made her, to glint through palace-windows across the marble floors and gild Hamlet's high-strung nerves. That noble mind,—
"The expectancy and rose of the fair state,The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,The observ'd of all observers,"—
is not playing at the feet of a fatuous woman, with silly, pretty face, and bird-like chatter of a soulless brain, to marry that misery at last. Many a superior man ties such a bunch of plumage, with the minutest mouthful of a body inside of it, into his buttonhole; when it falls out, the tie drags it, feebly fluttering, across the ground. But Ophelia has an instinct deep enough to fathom "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword;" and he as instinctively surrenders his depths to that survey, which is none the less sufficing because it is so artless. No: it is all the more competent to correspond to his wide temper; the only ladyhood in the land for its only prince.
Fair flower, half-drooping, half-springing from a cleft in Elsinore's grim platform, where wafts of ghostly air shudder out of the midnight of the frosty ocean, and the fate-sisters who take the breath of heroes are at hand. At length the dreadful secret mingles with her fragrance, which then comes to us distempered. She does not know what has happened; but in the sudden death and private burial of her father, slain by her own lover, she, sitting amid the relics of a rejected love, listening across the "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh" of her old lover's soul-chime, intuitively feels 'that there are
"Tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,That carry but half sense."
With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a faint, outline against the background of these palace treacheries and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is,and fashioned solely for dependence: a disposition, not a will; a wife for Hamlet's will, but poor to husband one of her own.
What will become of her? What becomes of the vine when lightning splits its oak? The clipping tendrils and soft green have lost their reason for existing when the wood which centuries have grained is blasted in an hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow sere, rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs to every wanton wind. To wither is all that is left to do, since all that she could do was to love, to climb, to cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to make strength and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous quality.
She is free to love, yet bound by old-fashioned duty toward her father; and he belongs to the old fashion of supposing that a prince can only amuse himself, no matter what sweet protestations flow into her ear. She cannot believe it; nor, when her flighty brother serves her with long-winded cautions on the same subject, does she hardly seem to listen. Her answers are so short that she plainly does not share his solicitude. In fact, she is highly amused to see him play the prig with the consequential air which only a brother can assume. Between the lines there are peals of girlish laughter, not printed, as she turns upon him with the advice to take himself into custody. This amusement ripples through her retort:—
"Good my brother,Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,And recks not his own rede."
The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no means decide that she was passionate enough to justify so much advice on the point. Some nurse who crooned over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps which floated into her unconscious girlhood. It frequently happens to an unwary, half developed youth that things not excessive in decorum get established in the memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless something demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her modesty all to tatters, they escape, and wander without a rag of clothing through her talk. They do not betray that she was ever less than a true lady. She rebukes Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of unmasking the king ferments in him with the flightiest remarks, and his tongue rides a steeple-chase over the bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and says to him, "You are naught, you are naught: I'll mark the play." However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman; for she has often silently felt the effluence of an honest man whose manners and morals were noble. She pays no consideration to the family caution.
It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia from our censure while she is chanting those free ditties of an olden time. We listen to them in company with the pitying King and Queen: the air seems to gather pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally fullof sensibility; so, when she enters in the first mad scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both increases our sadness and calls upon us to create what should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate her sacred privacy: thinking more of that than of the words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries,—
"O rose of May!Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!"
And the King says, "How do you, pretty lady?" Yes, that she is, through it all. If she had her wits, and were using them to persuade us to revenge her, it could not move like these piteous, tender improprieties.
"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,She turns to favor and to prettiness."
For she sings without smirching a single petal of the daisies and pansies, which she so softly distributes, with such an appeal of forlornness, to bid their fragrance disinfect her language, or to speak for her in the natural key of her wonted maidenhood. So every heart exhales in the pity that plays the magic of distance and softens the unsightliness of her ruin.
Shakspeare has given most touchingly rational applications to her distribution of the flowers. The flowers themselves are culled in fancy: she holds no actual nosegay in her hand. She recalls, together with the long-unheeded songs, all that she learned in girlhood aboutthe symbolic meanings of flowers; and a light irony invests some of them. It is plain that the rosemary, for remembrance, is ideally bestowed upon Laertes, with pansies too: "A document in madness; thoughts and remembrance fitted." Rosemary was supposed to have the quality of strengthening the memory. The volatile Laertes will have need of it, and of as many thoughts as he can muster. The fennel ought to be handed to Horatio, and the columbines should be intended for the king: the one is a symbol of flattery and is exchanged among courtiers, but Horatio never learned the useful trade; the others are expressive of ingratitude and cuckoldom. Was Hamlet's father slain because of that? The columbines were earned betimes! There's rue for the queen; for she has great need of repentance. There's rue for herself too. Both need it; but the queen with a difference, as her moral condition differed from Ophelia's. We may call it an herb that leads to grace. There's a daisy. She recognizes it, but ought not to keep it for herself. And there is no other maiden present. It represents frivolous and light-thoughted girls. She would give Laertes some violets, if they had not all withered when his father died. These delicate allusions make us think that before the distraction set in Ophelia had inklings of the foul concerns around her. All the more hopeless, then, became the overthrow of reason.
Hamlet is too finely endowed to sport with her inclining maidenhood. She has no more calculation than a flower. She lets her beauty bend towards him without timidity; for she likes that he should sip the chalicewhich he will not rudely shatter. After every visit he used to leave behind him a sense of honor which occupied her heart when his lips had ceased protesting. Yet she will defer to the father, with the instinct, perhaps, that more favorable dispositions will transpire. Polonius, the old stickler for the conventions of royalty, is thoroughly possessed with the idea that the Prince, from that point of view, cannot be intending marriage. Some over-subtle critics will have it that the old schemer is secretly chuckling over the idea that a match may be made, but that he dreads the king. If Hamlet can only be brought to the decisive point, and held there, the temper of the court will be of little consequence. But what method shall be employed with a prince who so loves to push off upon his moods of feeling to let them get unhitched and float him from corresponding facts? A double contrivance occurs to Polonius,—to protect his daughter from the possible waywardness of a prince, and to pique him into making a declaration of alliance. This is a delicate operation; for the king will jealously scrutinize his movements. It seems as if he was merely protecting his daughter, and keeping faith with his king, when he urges her not to receive the letters which besiege her door, nor to admit him any longer to her presence. Then the sly old rat, not yet gone to burrow behind the arras, hopes to gnaw into the King by attributing Hamlet's strange behavior to love for Ophelia. And he has so nicely arranged matters, by prohibiting letters and visits, that when the King, bending severe brows upon him, asks, "How hath she received hislove?" he can reply, with a flush of honor, "What do you think of me?"
I cannot find that the context will justify this theory. It is contradicted by the evident alarm and sorrow which the old man displays when Ophelia describes the piteous plight of Hamlet after his repulse; for what does Polonius know about a "father's spirit in arms" laying waste the Prince's soul? No: he must be deep in love; and Polonius must hasten to report it to the King.
We recur to the plain theory that Polonius supposes that a king's son is out of the star of her unaspiring thought, and that such a match would be against the stomach of the Court. He will cling to his lord chamberlain's staff and totter with it to the end. The daughter, respecting his fears, inflicts this harsh repulse upon Hamlet. How we pity the Prince, who is turned away from her dear house whither he would have longed to repair, weighed down with his awful secret, to place his heart upon her restfulness, and let its rhythm soothe the cracking nerves! Yet she "did return his letters, and denied his access," perhaps the very morning after he had sworn the platform oath. There's nothing to depend on left in Denmark. Who next is false? What truth or feeling escapes the monstrous irony?
But mark how quickly Ophelia's love jumps at the father's plan to bring them again together, as if by accident, in order that the King and he may observe, by the nature of the interview, whether he is mad from love of her. And when he thrusts a book into her hand, that she may have the pretence of reading when Hamletenters, she gladly adopts the whole device; for has she not just heard the Queen confess that she hopes Hamlet loves her?
"For your part, Ophelia, I do wishThat your good beauties be the happy causeOf Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtuesWill bring him to his wonted way again,To both your honors."
Can she believe her ears? Hamlet's own mother hopes, as she afterwards confessed directly above Ophelia's grave, that she may become the wife of Hamlet. Then all the scruples of Laertes and her father are groundless. However indisposed the King may feel to such a match, she has a suitor in the heart of the mother. Welcome the opportunity, welcome any stratagem, even that of taking his remembrances from her bosom, to have them returned to her,—a woman's wile to receive them back more rich than ever with smiles of a recovered love.
The more common theory is that Ophelia does not suspect the mother's inclination for such a marriage. The Queen's language is guarded, and capable of two interpretations; but she spoke in the presence of the King. Measure the extent of her meaning by the depth of Ophelia's grave. Still, it is commonly thought that Ophelia understands the Queen to expect of her to make Hamlet realize the hopelessness of his passion, trusting to have his disorder dismissed with his love. In that case, she is merely yielding to the father's suggestion that these remembrances of his shall be returned; and the old plotter has arranged this for the King to witness. Filial deference cannot stoop lower than this sad enforcement; but her whole life has been the non-assertion of a will. She,
"Of ladies most deject and wretched,That suck'd the honey of his music vows,"
and who longed to
"Bring him to his wonted way again,"
is still so docile, so subject to the pervading influence of her father's house, that she declares to Hamlet she has wished for a long time to redeliver his gifts and letters, "of so sweet breath composed." And when we hear her say,
"To the noble mind,Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind,"
we have a glimpse of the interview that was brought on by him when, as she was sewing in her chamber, he forced himself into her presence, in disordered dress, and with a manner as if he would dismiss her from his heart. It wounded and distressed her:—
"Oh, woe is me!To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!"
It need not seem unnatural that the fair girl is so obsequious to the father's will. We find no mother in the house: she is gone, and the only daughter and only son transfer their love of a mother to the bereaved father, and cling to him with a devotion that includes a special submissiveness. They live very much withdrawn into themselves, and mutually dependent. The gentledaughter consults in her solitude the wishes and humors, even the whims, of the father, whose capacity for giving sound advice she perceives to have greatly aged. She loves to be retired within the old mansion, whose still life suits a maiden shyness. We come upon her sewing in her chamber, thinking of Hamlet.
"As patient as the female dove,When that her golden couplets are disclos'd,"
she sits drooping in silence, remembering her lord, but remembering too that, when her father pooh-poohed her talk about the Prince's affection for her, and bade her look out for herself, she sighed and said, "I shall obey, my lord." She is very much absorbed in contriving solace for a lonely father. So, when she learns that he has been killed, and that the blow was dealt by Hamlet, by what freak of accident she cannot understand,—but "a young maid's wits" prove to be "as mortal as an old man's life,"—the daughter suddenly empties every thing out of her heart except affection for the cherished, fatuous old father: her love for Hamlet is spilled out through that rent in the arras, as we can notice when all her pretty, distracted singing yields not a tone that might be an echo of the sweet episode in her poor little life. For otherwise, when madness broke up her maidenly reserve, and permitted us to pry into the dispositions of her soul, we ought to have found there a love for Hamlet as deeply seated as devotion to a father; but it never was so deep, and never had time enough to surmount all other considerations. Therefore the sad wanderings bury the father over and over again, finding a fresh grave for him each time:—
"He is dead and gone, lady,He is dead and gone;At his head a grass-green turf,At his heels a stone.White his shroud as the mountain snow,Larded with sweet flowers;Which bewept to the grave did go,With true-love showers."
"We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they should lay him in the cold ground. My brother shall know of it;" and on the strength of that she culls out rosemary for him.
"They bore him bare-fac'd on the bier,And in his grave rain'd many a tear;
Fare you well, my dove!" says this loyal daughter. We echo it, but with a difference: she is this dove to whom we bid farewell. For already "in the distance one white arm is seen above the tide," clutching at the branches of a willow growing askant a brook; and our pulse premeditates the funeral strain that goes graveward while her Prince is looking "at the skull as though Death had written on it the history of man."
Poor maiden, to be churlishly suspected of making an end of herself, when we know that "an envious sliver broke" and let her into that coffin strewn with flowers,—the tributes, not to womanhood in its capacity to resolve, to outlive destiny, to outdo circumstance with patience, to contrive escapes from disaster, but simply "sweets to the sweet," turned as they were to immortal amaranths when Hamlet's breath endowed them:—
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothersCould not, with all their quantity of love,Make up my sum."
Then, too late for her, but not for us, to atone for her chariness of language and action, all her gifted simplicity is revealed to justify the silent past and to ennoble Hamlet for his heart's choice of such an unambitious soul. What freighted her might have kept Hamlet riding on a steady keel upon any ocean that was not phantom-haunted. Death casts up her freight underneath the cliffs of this stern tragedy, and we are wreckers all along the shore to recover strays from the sail that love had chartered.
When the procession enters the churchyard, Hamlet steps aside to be unperceived. There is not a trait in this scene which does not illustrate Ophelia's character, and reflect a tender worth upon it. Hamlet wonders who it is, what person of estate whom they follow, "and with such maimèd rites." When Laertes steps forward, Hamlet praises him to Horatio. This deepens our feeling of his unconsciousness that it is a brother who is burying that beloved sister. 'Tis our common fashion of noting, with slightly raised sympathy, the mourners in a train that bears away nothing particularly dear to us. "What ceremony else?" Nothing more: the stubborn old priest will not venture his own salvation on another word for her whose "death was doubtful." Where he got that notion does not appear in the play. It is like Malcolm's crotchet that Lady Macbeth took herself off "by self and violent hands." But notions are the sheet-anchors of formalists. The priest drops his, swings round, and becomes immovable. He complains, with the whine of a man who has been imposed upon,that "here she is allow'd her virgin crants, her maiden strewments," and even a bell! If the sour old ritualist could have had his way, he would have pitched "shards, flints, and pebbles" over her. It is not only pity which increases, but respect, with every line: it takes her part, and magnifies her nature. There must have been more of her than we used to think. So, when the requiem is denied, Laertes pronounces it for all when he says,—
"A minist'ring angel shall my sister be,"
as she always had been. And our sentiment recalls the dominant excellence of her character. If ever the priest himself should come to grief, and lie howling in that place which is paved with good intentions and bad practices, she would be the first to toss him a sprig of "herb o' grace o' Sundays."
When Laertes lets fall the word "sister," Hamlet appears to utter nothing but ordinary surprise,—"What! the fair Ophelia?"—and his action goes no further. Some critics have inferred, from this absence of manifested emotion, that Hamlet never really loved Ophelia, and that his subsequent passionate outbreak was only inspired by pique at seeing Laertes take on so with leaping into the grave as if to fill it with hyperboles of language. It is said that, at the very instant of hearing her name, a lover would have exclaimed bitterly, would have rushed forward into the funeral group to agitate its grief afresh with his own, would have sunk into some gesture of abandonment. Romeo might have improvised such a scene, but Hamlet was a different style oflover: he was always "ill at such numbers. His emotion smouldered underneath all the refinements of intellect and conscience, and rarely gleamed through the scruples of his will. When it did gain a moment's mastery, as in that scene of surrendering love,—
"He raised a sigh so piteous and profound,That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,And end his being,"
it palsied the tongue, and only advertised itself in the pathetic eyes which fell to such perusal of Ophelia's face, "and to the last bended their light" on her.
Let us try to conceive the situation at the grave. Hamlet has been absent in England during Ophelia's distraction. Returning, he strolls into a churchyard, amuses himself with the old grave-digger, withdraws aside when the train approaches, so as not to be recognized by the King. Then comes the discovery that Ophelia is dead. There was always in Hamlet's brain that time allowed for the transit of a message between his feeling and his deed. The line connected with a great many intermediate tracts, in each of which there was delay. Nothing but an unsyllabled fluid of conjecture passed all along the way. Dead? How? Was that glad girl the one to take her own life? Why? There was just time enough for him to hear that confession of his mother,—
"I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife."
What a remembrance, extorted from death, of the old love that he never could conceal from the mother'sinstinct which was so fond and clear! He listens thus to despair reclaiming former hopes, and it draws his spirit backward, so that the body cannot move and the tongue dare not break this sacred silence of his retrospection. Therefore, Laertes has plenty of time to rant like Pistol in a tavern. His exaggerated action plunges into the grave of Hamlet's reverie and breaks it up. The Prince is forced into disgust at hearing a man vaunt love against his own. All scruples are shrivelled up in anger; and he instinctively assumes the tone he hears. The old ironical disgust for sham makes the imitation perfect. Afterward, to Horatio, he acknowledges that he forgot himself:—
"But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put meInto a towering passion."
And this passion broke open his respect and prudence, and let loose the first cry of his love that had ever reached the ears of others. Else it would have lain buried with Ophelia in the silence of her lover's breast.
It was too much,—to discover at such a moment what used to be his mother's expectations; to see the sprinkling of those flowers that should have been for marriage; to have the old conviction return, that marriage was impossible for him,—a man whose bed, watched by a ghost, could have no other tenant; to recall how he ousted love, that revenge might occupy. It was too much for this heart of sensitive and noble strain to see the dead girl, and catch through the rant of Laertes that her prince had indirectly caused her death. His solidflesh could not melt: the coffin chilled it. But how long could he listen to this man, whose affected furor showed him to be a person incapable of deep passion? It fans all that smoulders in him into smoke and flame. In the rage of a temperament whose trick it always was to baffle itself, and in the bitterness of being reminded by her cold beauty that he had to surrender it while it was too young to die,—it is too masterful. He bursts into Laertes's vein with its own style,—
"Nay, an thou'lt mouth,I'll rant as well as thou,"
but soon checks himself with a half apology, and subsides.
How mobile and impressible he was, notwithstanding his large capacity of reason! The latter aided him to dissimulate and to keep his projects waiting; but the other traits nourished a fancy that easily turned to mimicry of whatever was transpiring; as when he assumed, half-consciously, the dandified phrasing of Osric, and played with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This plastic fancy jumped to the high stilts of Laertes, and it stalked to "make Ossa like a wart."
But his bosom secret has escaped. He turns away, is followed by Horatio, to whom, before the next scene opens, we hear him (though no folio nor quarto ever lisped a syllable of it) pouring out the confidences of a fruitless passion to the only honest man of all the crowd, the still and trusty comrade. This Shakspeare would have us understand, I think, by giving Hamlet to say to Horatio, as they enter the next scene together, "Somuch for this, sir." So much for what? we think. Then it dawns upon us that the only other interest of the moment must have been Ophelia's death.
And we recollect that Horatio was absent at the time of her death, having gone to meet Hamlet near the sea-coast. So both of them were ignorant of the occurrence. But now Horatio has been making inquiries during the time that elapses between the burial and the next scene. He picks up all the particulars, and has been detailing to the eager Hamlet all that we know. And Hamlet's entry upon the next scene is timed exactly when Horatio has ceased narrating. There is nothing more to tell. Hamlet enters, saying, "So much for this, sir. Now you shall see the other." That is, I will relate what has happened to me also, and how a divinity has shaped my ends to this return. And his brief life is claimed again by the native land on which a ghost has left the tracks of a murder; for great Heaven has not yet hunted it down. So
"Lay her i' the earth;And from her fair and unpolluted fleshMay violets spring,"
to renew the breed which withered with the death of her father.
MACBETH.
MACBETH.
Itis the opinion of Fleay that "'Macbeth,' in its present state, is an altered copy of the original drama, and the alterations were made by Middleton." Thomas Middleton wrote twenty-three plays. Among them was "The Witch," written, perhaps, in 1613, and published in 1617. Shakspeare's "Macbeth" was first played in 1606. It appears in the Folio of 1623 for the first time in print, as a more finished acting copy than the other plays. The divisions of acts and scenes and the stage directions are carefully marked. The death of Shakspeare occurred in 1616. It is possible that Middleton was the person who prepared the Folio copy of "Macbeth." Scarce a trace, however, of his own style can be suspected; for there is only occasionally a verbal similarity of the charms and incantations employed in "Macbeth" and "The Witch" of later date. In Act iii. 5, the burden of the song, "Come away, come away," and, in Act iv. 1, the song, "Black spirits," &c., are to be found in "The Witch:" the latter is merely indicated as a stage direction in "Macbeth." In Act i. 1, we are reminded of Middleton in "I come, Graymalkin!"[19]and "Paddock calls." He may have shoved his "Malkin" into that first chant of the witches, andspoiled its metre. But although the introduction of Hecate, in Act iii. 5, is said to be not Shakspearean enough in relevancy to the play, it is altogether too Shakspearean in style for Middleton, who never could have written,—
"Great business must be wrought ere noon:Upon the corner of the moonThere hangs avaporous drop profound;I'll catch it ere it come to ground:And that, distill'd by magic sleights,Shall raise such artificial spritesAs by the strength of their illusionShall draw him on to his confusion."
And we must notice that Hecate thus introduces and accounts for the "artificial sprites,"—the apparitions which deceive Macbeth in Act iv. 1, and entice him to "be bloody, bold, and resolute." This scene is certainly Shakspeare's. It is therefore probable that he would have preceded it by some inkling of the deceptive nature of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child crowned.
On the ground of an apparently un-Shakspearean style of metre in Act i. 2, which introduces the wounded sergeant, several commentators credit that scene also to Middleton. It is said to be too slovenly and bombastic for Shakspeare.
It is unsafe to limit the critical treatment of Shakspeare's verse to metrical or verbal tests. Æsthetic emergencies will sometimes overrule the decisions of the sharpest critics who construct Shakspeare out of reputed peculiarities of his style. He escapes from them to be raggeder than we think is personal to him, broaderthan our taste can tolerate, more thin or more fulsome than his grandest tone, whenever occasion summons traits which fit into a deeper consistency than that of style. Then, if the critic of metrical and verbal niceties is not also a human observer, or is too much preoccupied with his theory of the Shakspearean method, he will be apt to disparage some prescriptions of Nature.
It is also a very common procedure to illustrate the excellences of Shakspeare by comparing them with the inferior work of the contemporary dramatists. Either Shakspeare at his best ought to be matched with the other playwrights at their best, or else we ought to concede that his occasional weaknesses, which are like theirs, are not theirs, but his own. It is absurd to keep Shakspeare posturing incessantly in the finest attitude of the several periods of his style. During the Elizabethan age, England's soil stood thick with true poets whose fragrance often makes us suspect that Shakspeare is near. It is dangerous to be too positive upon the matter of sentiment as well as style. Take for an instance this:—
"I am so lightAt any mischief, there's no villainyBut is a tune methinks."
That lightness of heart is Middleton's. It is stray pollen from the garden of Shakspeare. But nothing is fructified: there is no tune in the villainous stuff which precedes and follows.
The wounded sergeant easily justifies his mangled metre and ragged pomposity of style. We should suspect a more polished messenger of shamming faintness from loss of blood. He talks exactly as a common soldier should who is fresh from the great fight, puffed up with "valor's minion," and steadying himself upon reeking lines to deliver his message of victory. Middleton could not have so caught the color of the moment.
It is also supposed that Middleton wrote the scene, because when Ross enters he tells the King that
"Norway himself, with terrible numbers,Assisted by that most disloyal traitorThe thane of Cawdor, 'gan a dismal conflict."
A discrepancy is charged between this and the report of Angus, in Scene 3 (acknowledged to be Shakspeare's), who enters with Ross, and says, concerning the thane of Cawdor,—
"Whether he was combin'dWith those of Norway; or did line the rebelWith hidden help and vantage; or that with bothHe labour'd in his country's wreck, I know not."
Perhaps Ross did not either. But he knew that Cawdor "assisted." He did not say that he was personally engaged in the fight.
The opening chant of the witches is denied to Shakspeare by one critic, because it seems to occupy the opening scene merely to inform us that they are to meet somewhere again; and by another it is attributed to Middleton because it does not flow in the usual trochaic manner of Shakspeare, and contains imperfect lines. Middleton may have Paddock and Graymalkin for his share in the attempt to spoil this grand chant, whoseaccent ought to have sung Shakspeare's feeling into the critic's ear; for so the foot of Fate would fall in order to pitch the key of the tragedy, and lead its crime into our presence. Its measured step seems to issue out of some foreboding by Macbeth of his ambition's purpose. The weird sisters are not merely enjoying a thunderstorm, and wondering when they shall meet again in similar favorable weather. Their lips put a stress of destiny upon every syllable. The poet's pen unconsciously follows in their traces.
The same metre is employed in the "Tempest" and "Midsummer-Night's Dream," by Ariel, Oberon, and Puck, when they are on sublunary business. But they
"Foot it featly here and there:"
the lines skim or flutter, and do not tread. The accent is not so persistent: it does not sound like the hinge on which a pause swings open to admit the foot of a thing that is burdened with a solemn message. On the blasted heath of Macbeth, the verses of Ariel would be like a strayed butterfly:—
"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."
He spurs the omen out of owls and bats, and rides them away from the chill of the evening, "after summer, merrily." Prospero, hearing him sing, says, "That's my dainty Ariel." Puck likewise, too mercurial for chanting, carols with a broom on his shoulder to make a clean sweep of mischief:—
"And we fairies, that do runBy the triple Hecate's team,From the presence of the sun,Following darkness like a dream,Now are frolic."
The lines go lilting like a little boat over the accent which can hardly raise a ripple. It is a supernature in the best of humor, beguiling or blessing men and women in a dulcet style.
But the witches chant holding torches of the lightning while the thunder slowly scans their verse:—
1 Witch.When shall we three meet again,In thunder, lightning, or in rain?2 Witch.When the hurlyburly's done,When the battle's lost and won.3 Witch.That will be ere set of sun.