WIT, HUMOR, AND SHAKSPEARE. (continued 3)

So while Northumberland's castle is agitated by the news of disaster, and the slain Percy is expected home by the halls he never shall inherit, Falstaff appears, with that diminutive page who was Christian when the Prince gave him, "and look, if the fat villain have not transformed him ape." We were pitying Northumberland, as in grief and anger he threw away his crutch, tore the "sickly quoif" from the head which princes aimed to hit, and called for iron to encase his forehead. What does this fat man here, jeering at his page for being smaller than he, and asking what Master Dumbleton said about the satin for his short cloak and slops? It must have been a mistake of some precipitate scene-shifter. No: there be peers of the realm and peerless blackguards; one is in revolt against his king, the other against all decency. But the play has a history which includes them both in its epoch, as Nature includes them; and for her it is but a step from Warkworth, where the old nobleman is weeping, to London, where this tavern-haunter defies fortune with his shifty gibes, and laments nothing but the consumption of his purse. What stimulus can there be for us in his gilded rascality so soon after Harry Percy's spur is cold? Shall we put up with him? We shall have no trouble: Falstaff undertakes to vindicate Nature for setting him in this company, and he does it with such resource and admirable cheerfulness that earldoms seem to have been created to be his foil.

His character belongs to comedy because its vices are of the breed which never contract alliances with great passions. The big frame is so completely inoculated with laughter that his faults cannot take the contagion of tragedy. His wit is an implement which his comic nature uses for purposes of self-defence. He is essentially comic before he opens his mouth: for he is built to brag, and is too fat to be brave; his fleshly propensities are latent with situations for covering him with ridicule; his talent for lying has the peril that it may be used too often. Yet, on the whole, he is of Swift's opinion, that a lie is too good a thing to be wasted. But let the Prince and Poins plot a little, and the Wives of Windsor beguile his loose vein, and the scene quickly runs to his discomfiture. The mountainous knave is caught in a trap which might have been baited for a mouse, so small that we wonder how his wit could have blundered into it. But, being in, his wit behaves so delightfully like virtue that we think he has escaped. "Nothing confutes me but eyes," he says. Only seeing is disbelieving such an embodied stratagem. "By the Lord, I knew ye!" said he to the Prince, after the midnight scare the latter gave him, and goes nigh to convince us that he ran away to avoid killing the heir-apparent. So large a man does not often wriggle so unctuously through such a narrow place. We should have to make his bail bear some correspondence to his bulk, if he lived where swindling was a signal for juries to disagree.

There is a scene where the Prince comes out of his hiding-place after Falstaff has been abusing him to Doll Tear-street.[6] "Didst thou hear me?" "Yes; and you knew me, as you did when you ran away by Gad's Hill: you knew I was at your back, and spoke it on purpose to try my patience." How slyly Falstaff avoids putting his foot into this trap; and the Prince underestimated his resources. "No, no, no, not so; I did not know thou wast within hearing. No abuse, Hal, on my honor; no abuse, Ned. I dispraised him before the wicked, that the wicked might not fall in love with him; and thy father is to give me thanks for it." His mind is supple and adaptive, yet all the more comical because the talent is futile for concealment, and only earns for him a laugh which shakes the arm suspended to chastise.

He extemporizes deafness, and does not hear the Chief Justice calling to him. When the attendant comes and plucks him by the elbow to bid him note the Justice, he gains time by inventing the pretext that a beggar has him by the sleeve. "What! a young knave, and beg!" But this resource was by no means invented by Falstaff. This world is an old hand at it; and, whenever the truth of one age summons the error of the past to arrest and judgment, the interested parties start a dodge, and stimulate it with voluble pretence of earnestness, hoping to make it serve their day, at least. When Galileo discovered the satellites of Jupiter, people expected the sky to fall. Something must be done to prop it up. So they said that, even if the satellites could be seen through the telescope, the inference that they were really in the sky was not a fair one; more likely they were something in the telescope itself.

When Scheiner, the Jesuit, discovered solar spots in 1611, he had to communicate the discovery to his Superior. The latter was an Aristotelian. He would not even risk a peep through Scheiner's telescope. He said: "I have read Aristotle's writings from end to end many times, and I have, nowhere found in them any thing similar to what you mention. Go, therefore, my son, and endeavor to tranquillize yourself. Be convinced that these appearances, which you take for spots, are the faults of your glasses or of your eyes; if they are not, as I in part suspect, the result of a disordered imagination." Texts and pretexts are still employed to prevent Theology and Science from coming to close quarters. Science impends and threatens with the majestic facts of the divine order. Theology, driven from pretext to pretext, cries at last, "What! upon compulsion? No: if reasons were as plenty as blackberries," nothing on compulsion! When Falstaff is hurried, he says, "Do you think me a swallow, an arrow, or a bullet? have I, in my poor and old motion, the expedition of thought?" That is the trouble with the ponderous old past; so it turns Falstaff's deaf ear to thought, and imitates his strategy.

He is a good mimic of the style of bluntness and honesty. Pretending to have killed Percy, he cries, "There is Percy: if your father will do me any honor, so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself." "Why," says the Prince, "Percy I killed myself." "Didst thou? Lord, lord, how is this world given to lying! If I may be believed, so; if not, let them that should reward valor bear the sin upon their own heads." You can hear the same tone to-day wherever shifty impudence pilfers the inventions and exploits of others to furnish with them a house and reputation. This style is comic because it is assumed to cover deceit, but is too scant a pattern after all; and the cloven foot is amusingly unconscious of being in full sight.

Sir John does not intend to be readily put down. In the matter of arrest at Dame Quickly's suit for debt, how airily he gives the Chief Justice tap for tap, and urges that the officers are hindering him from going on the king's errand! He is hard to get fairly cooped in a corner; most invaluable counsel to defend a ring, big enough to break through the most carefully woven indictment. When you think you have him neatly at bay, the bulky culprit floats over your head in a twinkling of resource and is gone: it is done so cleverly that you have not the heart to pursue him farther, or, if you do, it is only for the sake of enjoying an encore of this trapeze-shifting of his wit.

It is comic when his tone of protestation that he will discharge his debt to Dame Quickly succeeds in taking in her who has been so often deceived before. But one weakness is always too strong for another; so he is constantly betrayed into expense by her, and that is at once her vice and its reward. "I owe her money; and whether she be damned for that I know not."

It is also comic that his vanity prevents him from suspecting himself of cowardice and evasion of duty; so that he indulges the most inflated self-appreciation, and no misadventure is sharp enough to prick it. "Embowelled! 'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit." And his fright inspires him with the adage dear ever since to shirkers, "The better part of valor is discretion;" and it has a sensible purport which blinds him to his own disgrace. "There is not a dangerous action," complains he to the Chief Justice, "but I am thrust upon it. Well, I cannot last ever. But it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common. I would to God, my name were not so terrible to the enemy as it is." Does he really think his bullying style is a perpetual action of bravery, or is he delighting to be ironical upon himself?

Now Falstaff's mind has many a talent which liberates it from the grossness of his body. His wit shows a nimble foot of fancy. His common-sense is an acute ally of his cowardice. The imagination which betrays him into the largeness of his lying goes into the felicity of his wit: both are on an ample scale. He rallies Bardolph for his complexion, and overwhelms his ragged company with comparisons, just as his men in buckram grow in number. When his fancy seizes an opportunity he cannot let it go, but unconsciously shifts it into all possible lights, and exhausts invention to make the point emphatic. How many imaginative people there are who unconsciously lie in the same way with their exaggerated raptures at a landscape, their wholesale contributions to an occurrence! The flavor of stories improves by going to sea upon their bounding fancies. Only give them time enough and a free swing among their friends, and an event of the chimney-corner will become bewitched into a Cinderella at the ball. These people really believe with the imagination instead of with the understanding; and, if conscience is comparatively weak, common-sense is not a sufficient curb to their career.

Falstaff's ragged soldiers have hearts "no bigger than pins' heads." "A mad fellow met me on the way, and told me that I had unloaded all the gibbets, and pressed the dead bodies. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half-shirt is two napkins tacked together." This fanciful destitution reminds us of an American improvement upon it, attributed to a man the smallest hole in whose shirt was that for the head, so ragged that it had to be washed by the dozen.

All of Falstaff's speeches are one crescendo of phrases; each seems to breed the next one, and they swarm in his fancy like gnats in a broad sun. Bardolph's red features are very tropics to yield spicy railing to him. The ginger of it is hot in the mouth. He never sees that face but he thinks upon hell-fire, and Dives in his purple, burning. He imagines he saw it running up Gad's Hill in the pitchy dark, and took it for an ignis-fatuus. It has saved him a good deal of money in links and torches.

We come upon the same vein in the "Comedy of Errors," where Dromio says, "Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to, but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light. I warrant her rags, and the tallow in them, will burn a Poland winter: if she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world."

Falstaff might have said of himself that "wherever his shadow falls it leaves a grease-spot."

Shakspeare evidently relished these unctuous conceits, for in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," when Falstaff's wooing in the forest is suddenly interrupted, he says, "I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that is in me should set hell on fire; he would never else cross me thus."

There is sometimes in Shakspeare an exaggeration of this kind which has a Titanic grasp to it that throttles laughter just as it meditates escape. The grotesque and humorous element is stunned by a fierce and passionate feeling, such as Dante might have steeped one of the circles of his Inferno in. A specimen of this may be found in "Henry VIII.," where Lord Abergavenny, talking about Wolsey's low-born greatness, says:

"But I can see his pride Peep through each part of him: whence has he that? If not from hell, the devil is a niggard; Or has given all before, and he begins A new hell in himself."

All the followers of Falstaff catch his habit of improving Bardolph's redness. The Page could not distinguish his face through a red lattice, but, at last spying his eyes, thought he had made two holes in a new red petticoat to peep through. And, after Falstaff is dead, a boy recalls his fanciful notion that a flea sticking upon Bardolph's nose was a black soul burning in hell. A specimen worthy of Falstaff is found in an ancient Greek epigram which celebrates a nose so long that the owner could never hear himself sneeze. But Falstaff's imagination is so prolific that we feel as if a great many of these comments on the text of Bardolph's nose had not come down to us.

But the talent itself has descended; and Falstaff may be regarded as the mighty progenitor of the American knack at exaggerating, into which imagination must enter either to make it witty or simply ludicrous. We can match the felicities of Falstaff from every State of the Union. Indeed, we are of opinion that emigration, which has impaired the physical fulness of the Anglo-Saxon man, has not depleted the vein of his humor: our romancing talent is as vast as the country which nourishes it by all enterprises and ambitions. We have not fallen away vilely; we do not bate, do not dwindle. Mr. Dickens declares that even the national habit of expectoration is on the scale of the country's streams. He is a genuine descendant of Falstaff, and he must have always lived at Gad's Hill, where, at some time or other, he helped the Prince and Poins to rob the fat knight, and outwitted all his accomplices by taking imagination for his best share of the booty. So we are not much surprised to hear him describe a high wind with the amplitude of Falstaff's girth: "The air was for some hours darkened with a shower of black hats, which are supposed to have been blown off the heads of unwary passengers in remote parts of the town, and have been industriously picked up by the fishermen." When Grip, his raven, falls sick, towards eleven o'clock he was so much worse that "it was found necessary to muffle the stable-knocker."

But we have made improvements in this style of fiction, and almost every newspaper might furnish forth a play. We are told of grass in Colorado that is so short you must lather it before you can mow. We hear of a man who moves about so lazily that when he works in his garden the shade of his hat kills the plants. Another man wakes up in the morning, after a day spent in hunting strawberries, with only one eye, the other being engaged in holding the cheek which had marched over it during the night. It was a case of dog-wood poison. The relatives did not find his mouth until near noon, when it was discovered just back of his left ear, enjoying the shade. There was a man who stood on his head under a pile-driver to have a pair of tight boots driven on. He found himself shortly after in China, perfectly naked and without a cent in his pocket.

There is a man in the West who is so bow-legged that his pantaloons have to be cut out with a circular saw. Apropos of this, a pair of pantaloons which was distributed to one of the sufferers by the forest fires, a few years ago, was found to be ridiculously small. The man's wife wanted to know if there lived and breathed a man who had legs no bigger: if there did, he ought to be taken up for vagrancy as having no visible means of support. It was discussed whether to use them for gun-cases, or to keep the tongs in. This reminds us that Falstaff said you might have thrust Shallow, "and all his apparel, into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court."

In the same style of minifying a thing by magnifying its minuteness, he says, "If I were sawed into quantities, I should make four dozen of such bearded hermit's staves as Master Shallow." Then he delights himself with fancying how he will riot over the slim subject and endow it with every imaginable chance for provoking laughter: "I will devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter, the wearing out of six fashions. Oh, it is much that a lie with a slight oath, and a jest with a sad brow, will do with a fellow that never had the ache in his shoulders! Oh, you shall see him laugh, till his face be like a wet cloak ill laid up!"

A lie with an oath not always slight, "and a jest with a sad brow," is a prophecy of America which Mr. Sumner might have incorporated among his other classic Voices.

The country also supplies specimens of a wild-cat oratory in whose bombast Shakspeare might have recognized an element of his own imagination. I am not certain whether the following is genuine, or possesses only the truth of verisimilitude: "Build a worm-fence around the winter's supply of summer weather; skim the clouds from the sky with a teaspoon; catch a thunder-cloud in a bladder; break a hurricane to harness; ground-sluice an earthquake; lasso an avalanche; pin a napkin on the crater of an active volcano; but, Mr. Chairman, never expect to see me false to my principles." On the whole, the stress laid upon the "principles" is quite in favor of its American genuineness.

The quality of imagination which creates the humorousness of an exaggeration can also be fine enough to stop it before a laugh is raised. In that case it may be charged with the subtlety of wit. But, if the poetic feeling predominates, the sense of wit is merged in that, and requires an after-thought to recall it; as when Shakspeare describes how the populace rushed to see Cleopatra coming up the river Cydnus, leaving Antony in the market-place: he

"Did sit alone, Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in Nature."

"But for vacancy" is a phrase that piques suggestion. It may be that the air dreads leaving a vacuum if it goes to see her. It may be that Antony's whistling vaguely detains it. Or it may be that the air is in a mood so vacuous that it cannot entertain any preference for any thing, even for Cleopatra. And the possibility that the atmosphere could all leave and go elsewhere is an extravagance at once large and subtle. But, just as the smile impends, the ample poetry of the whole passage checks it.

A passage from "The English Traveller" of Thomas Heywood, published in 1633, is thoroughly American in its style of describing a drinking scene, and the shipwreck of the company by drink. The topers suddenly conceive that the room is a vessel laboring at sea: one climbs the bed-post and reports turbulent weather, whereat all go to work to lighten the vessel by throwing the furniture into the street. One man gets into the bass-viol for a cock-boat. When the constable enters he is taken for Neptune, and his posse for Tritons. In short, the American gift for exaggeration was started under an Elizabethan sun.

Sometimes the breadth of imagination produces the effect of wit by bringing two incongruous ideas under one statement. During a political procession, a remarkably dirty man, stopping in front of a small boy who was sitting on a fence, expected to have some fun with him. "Well, boy, how much do you weigh?" "As much as you would if you were washed." Such a free-soiler as that can be matched with nothing short of a line of Shakspeare:

"Lord of thy presence, and no land beside."

The American would be quite capable of composing narratives in the Eastern vein, as in that series of fables called the Hitopadesa, which attributed to animals the passions and motives of men. The famous mediæval poem of "Reynard the Fox" presumes the same intelligence. Here is a specimen, whose slight flavor of coarseness is lost and forgotten in the genius of its climax. Just as a traveller was writing his name on the register of a Leavenworth hotel, a certain insect took its way across the page. Laying down the pen, the man remarked, "I've been bled by St. Joe fleas, bitten by Kansas City spiders, and interviewed by Fort Scott gray-backs; but hang me if I was ever in a place where these critters looked over the register to take the number of your room."

A Western editor, culminating in his description of a tornado, said, "In short, it was a wind that just sat up on its hind legs and howled."

Some of the Texan cows have been lately described as so thin that it takes two men to see one of them. The men stand back to back, so that one says, "Here she comes!" and the other cries, "There she goes!" Thus between them both the cow is seen.

All these American instances are conceived in the pure Shakspearian blending of the understanding and the imagination. But one more of them, perhaps the most artistically perfect of all, must suffice. A coachman, driving up some mountains in Vermont, was asked by an outside passenger if they were as steep on the other side also. "Steep! Chain lightnin' couldn't go down 'em witheout the breechin' on!"

We have seen in what the comedy of Falstaff's character consists. Its humor lies in the tolerance which his inexhaustible wile procures for his vices. We are all the time reconciled to his behavior, though in anybody else it would be outrageous,—"most tolerable and not to be borne." But such a Noachian deluge of animal spirits would carry away a bulkier man than he. It is love of fun more than villainous inclination which leads him into many of his scrapes. When he is moralizing upon his course of life, and half-earnestly complaining that the Prince had been the ruin of him, the latter has only to interrupt this strain with, "Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?" when he drowns his megrims in the jolliest laugh, and draws his belt another hole for an adventure. The midnight frolic, with sack and supper afterwards, attracts him quite as much as the prospect of checking the consumption of his purse. He is quite conscious of a mercurial disposition that keeps the door ajar for every temptation. There are intervals of self-upbraiding—or are they seedy forenoons before the sherris sets in to wet his coast?—when he wishes the Prince were not such a rascally, fascinating companion. And we ought to put to Falstaff's credit the fact that to be hail-fellow with a prince has unsettled many a sterner virtue; and he says flatly to him that he wishes they knew "where a commodity of good names were to be bought."

When the old lord of the council rated him, he was too proud to seem to attend, but quite aware that he had been blown up in a justifiable way. His love of mirth is a better ally than the Prince, far more sumptuous and capable; for it helps us to condone his follies, and so qualifies him to be an object of Humor.

And reflection pursues the train which Humor starts. We are charmed into admitting that there must undoubtedly be many good native qualities, still unobscured, lingering in vicious haunts and courses; and Humor has no sublimer mission than to make us tolerate that thought. She seizes the coy hand of Philanthropy, and beguiles it "with nod and beck and wreathed smile" towards its rugged purpose.

There are some places which we only venture to visit in Shakspeare's company. We have been too well bred to seek our vices in such quarters, but not so well bred as to accommodate no vice. We cannot air our intolerance before the Searcher of hearts; perhaps we are grateful to him for that gift of Shakspeare which bids the tavern and the brothel be tolerable to our conscience by the touches of nature which make the whole world kin. Our respect for mankind is increased if the men who disgrace it can still be made to appear inseparable members of it. When we see the common air pressing in to ventilate the most infected places, we admire this brave, elastic quality, and rejoice to feel it fill our lungs. But what policeman or sanitary commissioner can we trust in a tour to inspect the cesspools of the world? Only such an one who has the counterinfection of his own impartial light and air. We follow in the wake of his geniality, forget to hold disinfectants to our nose, find the air still medicinal, since it has retained qualities belonging to ourselves; and we step from ward to ward with a reconciling smile.

We do not quite relish the rebuff which Prince Hal, after his accession, administers to Sir John. Our good-nature is wrenched by the abrupt transition from roystering fellowship and complicity with all of Falstaff's infirmities. We acknowledge that the King cannot go on countenancing the courses which, as the Prince, he found so amusing; but we are sorry that he could not let down the tutor and the feeder of his riots more softly. His downfall carries Justice Shallow with him, to be sure, of whom he had borrowed a thousand pounds, fortunately for our sense of poetic justice: and there is some recompense for Falstaff's mortification in hearing Shallow whimper for his money; for he lent to the knight and to his golden prospects, not to the prodigal Sir John. And it is good to see the indomitable wit outflank even this disaster with the advice to Shallow not to grieve; he will be sent for in private; the King must appear thus sternly to the world.

The King has cut the cord of their mutual revelling at one stroke. Down tumbles Falstaff, and it breaks his heart; as Dame Quickly says, "The King has killed his heart." Nym says bluntly, "The King hath run bad humors on the knight, that's the even of it;" which Pistol adorns thus: "Nym, thou hast spoke the right; his heart is fracted and corroborate." There was a human heart, then, involved in his enjoyment of the Prince's condescension. Yes, and no reasons of state can quite reconcile us to the sudden frost which fell upon its flower, flaunting as it was and rank of smell; since both of the men interchanged it, and wore it on their breast as token of copartnership in folly. Shakspeare himself cannot convince me that there was kingliness in thus snapping up the partner of his revels and sending him to the Fleet. It would have broken the heart of any less bulky comrade. Perhaps it is the nature of kings and titled men to be suddenly forgetful of the humanness which generally makes a man ineligible to office; so that the kingship was a charter from Providence to give Falstaff his first sneap of retribution. None the less do we sympathize with him rather than with the King, because we are all prodigals out of office.

But notice the art of Shakspeare in this, that, if the King had broken with his old pal in such a way as not to hurt our feelings, we should not have been so well prepared to sympathize with the manner of his death. When that hour comes, we feel the full effect of Humor in the unwillingness to let our knowledge of his grossness and knavery break the legacy of his geniality. It sets in again, to take him off, "at the turning o' the tide." Dame Quickly, Bardolph, and the rest, cannot prevent reminiscences of his wit from seasoning their tears. Her story of his end, with its delicious inconsequence, cannot blunt the thrust we feel when he plays with flowers and babbles of green fields; and it suddenly occurs to us that the battered old sinner had once listened to the birds in the hedge-rows, and climbed summer trees to explore their nests. This bloated breather of tavern fumes had expanded a boy's glad lungs on the English hillsides, and shared the landscape's innocence. It just saves us from damning him, and we shift elsewhere the responsibility of doing that, though we are not prepared to go as far as Bardolph, who says he would like to be with him "wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell." "Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." Dame Quickly, "clear thy crystals," for at least he was none the worse for being witty; and Bardolph may some day find himself in company that is at once bad and criminally stupid.

FOOTNOTES:

HAMLET.

HAMLET.

In this play it is common to look for an exhibition of humor in the scene of the Grave-diggers; but those personages are only amusing as a couple of common men whose profession seems to have buried both their feelings and their wits. One of them is accidentally witty when he asks, "Is she to be buried in Christian burial, that wilfully seeks her own salvation?" But he and his companion do not make good the promise of this opening text: they turn out to be tedious louts who bring ale-house chatter to a churchyard and only rise to the dignity of being ghastly, although we know that the grave they dig is for Ophelia. We do not properly recollect and feel this till they disappear and the music of the funeral train is heard. Their shovelfuls of dirt and bones make coffin-like cæsuras in their singing, but the songs are too trivial to be trolled over a pot; scarce are they a setting to an empty skull. They rattle so dryly you wish they might be dumped in and covered up. The sexton-riddles have little more juice in them, for they are the kind that boozy gossips clink out of their cans, and not the gay pursuivants of wisdom. We begin to reflect that such triviality does not become interesting because it is well hit off, and that in one respect it is not well hit off, since it recurs too tiresomely; and we are on the point of voting the whole grave-digging business to be a mouldy impertinence, when there flashes upon us the better thought that Shakspeare was here deepening pathos upon the fair maid who must be the tenant of this grave so fatuously dug. To this complexion must we all come at last, and beauty cannot repel the loutish hands which take their fee for shovelling dirt upon its clay.

There is so little comic business in this scene that actors are at their wits' end to make it hold the audience. They used to wear a dozen or two waistcoats, and, pretending to be hot and blown, strip them off, one after another; wearing all the time an air as if each one was the last, until you doubted whether, instead of a man inside, there were any thing more than a yardstick to measure vest-patterns with. So Thackeray takes George IV. to pieces by peeling away all the well-known articles of his apparel,—"under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." But the waistcoated business always secured the laugh which the clowns' insipid discussion could not raise.

This scene, as it stands in the Folio of 1623, had no existence in the earlier Hamlets, and was plainly an after-thought of Shakspeare as he moulded the play to its perfection.

In the vignettes of mediæval manuscripts and the frescoes of chapels, there were ghastly drawings of the Dance of Death, or the so-called Danse Macabre.[7] It was a retort of religious art upon the fleshly man by the spectacle of his own skeleton waltzing down "the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." But blood runs counter to the violent bad taste of these unfleshed processions; they contrast with the warm truth of Nature too sharply for the work of redemption. Shakspeare was anxious not to point the old moral, but to enhance our pity: he needed this contrast with Ophelia. Perhaps he was recalling those paintings when he set the grave-digger dancing stark naked in his verses. "O rose of May, dear maid!" He purposely lifts a handful of mould to our faces, that we may smell the rose above it.

"A pickaxe, and a spade, a spade, For ——, and a shrouding sheet: Oh, a pit of clay for to be made For such a guest is meet."

Taine mentions with surprise that the English audiences still laugh when Hamlet traces the noble dust of Alexander to its final bier in a bung-hole. The Frenchman does not relish the broadness of the incongruity between the great commander and a cask of ale. But the laugh comes rightly in with the boldness of fancy which suddenly brings together such opposite things. The effect is like that of witnessing any ludicrous circumstance which takes no account of dignity. Extremes meet with a shock, as if a great orator's chair should be whipped away just as he sits down from his climax. Hamlet does not think it too curious to consider how indifferent Nature is to all our pomp: she is not impressed, and serves it with not one inopportune mischance the less.

After Hamlet's interviews with the ghost, the "antic disposition" which tints his behavior is ironical; his remarks keenly cut down to where our laugh lies, but scarcely let its blood. The mood does not throw open the great valves of the heart as the sun-burst of Humor does. We enjoy seeing with what superior insight he baffles all the spies who cannot play upon a pipe, yet expect to play upon him. This gives to the scene the flavor of comedy. In the churchyard we taste the subacid of cynicism, so that Yorick's skull is quite emptied of its humor, and is only an ill-savored text to a chop-fallen discourse upon mortality.

But Hamlet radiates a gleam of geniality at a moment when you are least expecting it, as events transpire which ought to kill, you would think, the very heart of such a feeling: it is, indeed, expiring,—caught as it falls in the arms of the coming Irony. Let us enter, with Horatio and Marcellus, the scene upon the platform after Hamlet's dread interview with a murdered father. No wonder that his wonted evenness of manner is shaken; and we hear him writing truisms in his tablet, in a flighty style, as, for instance, that a man may smile and be a villain. But let us also make a note of that, as he did: it will interpret to us the tone of his subsequent demeanor which everybody thought was madness. In the mean time we are upon this spectre-haunted platform, seeking with his friends to discover what news the ghost brought. Hamlet trifles with them to put off their curiosity; but the scene soon rises to the solemnity of taking an oath, and one that is extorted by the experience of a vision which comes to so few that mankind has only heard of such things. But just as the human voices are about to pledge themselves to a secrecy which they must feel all their lives, and shudder in feeling, to be reflected upon them from the glare and publicity of purgatorial fires, a voice comes, building this terrific chord of a nether world up to their purpose, that it may unalterably stand. "Swear!" The deep craves it of them; it has joined the company uninvited, but they feel convinced that it is a comrade fated to go with them to their graves. "Swear!" it reiterates: no change of place can remove them from this importunity. The centre of an unatoned murder is beneath every spot to which they shift their feet.

Now the two friends of Hamlet possess nerves which have been hitherto tuned only by the vibrations of the sunshine or of the moon's unhaunted silver. Even if they had known of the murder, their interest in it would not have been personal enough to lend fortitude to help them tolerate this unseen visitor, the murdered man himself! What an encounter! Whose wits of earthly stoutness can sustain it? They feel, and so do we, that the awe is accumulating into a wave that may o'ertopple every sense.

Here mark how superior Shakspeare would have us estimate Hamlet to be, with a capacity of self-possession and a readiness to recur to it. He perceives their friendship to be sorely tried, and on the point of crumbling; and as men muster to repair a dyke, so his resource is prompt, drawn from a soul that can make even a ghost companionable, and no match at all for any bantering mood of his. Tush, my friends! it is no ghost at all: 'tis a "fellow in the cellarage." There's a human phrase for which this wild weather provides a rift; it touches the awe with a strange smile that relieves the men to complete their pact before all the blood of friendship curdles. And we who listen are also kept within our human kind.

"You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" What a sentence to puncture the abyss of the supernatural!

Then Hamlet shifts his standing-place for the sake of his friends; but the unavenged murder is underneath there awaiting them. So the Prince lightly rallies it for its knack of burrowing: he nicknames it an old mole, and the fancy is pleasant; for it occurs to him that he must work under ground for the future; so he calls the mole "a worthy pioneer." "Once more remove, good friends." Then, as he instructs them with minute precautions against ever seeming too wise about the subterranean disposition he may choose to follow, the awful revenge cries up again to them. But their nerves, by this time wonted to the strangeness, no longer need the relief of his ironical braving; so Hamlet dismisses that vein, and lets a murdered father claim the scene to close it with its proper color subdued to the solemn reassurance, "Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!" Then our own spirits venture forth into calmness and hush of the breaking day.

Not the faintest streak of Humor appears in this tragedy to reconcile us with the drift of it. Polonius belongs to comedy, because he is an old counsellor who was once valuable, whose wits have grown seedy on purpose to delight us with his notion that he fathoms and circumvents the Prince. When a man's feeling of importance has outlived his value, so that his common-sense trickles feebly over the lees of maxims, and his policies are absurd attempts to appear as shrewd as ever before persons who are in better preservation, he belongs to the comic side of life. We cannot help smiling at his most respectable recommendations; for they are like hats lingering in fashion, but destitute of nap. He wears one of these, and goes about conceiting that his head mounts a gloss. There is not enough of Polonius left to tide him through this tragedy, unless it might have been in dumb show: he must lurk behind an arras to get himself mistaken for a king; and, as he does this after sending a spy into France to watch his son's habits, we have not a tear to spare. And we only think how delightfully bewildered he will be if his ghost gets out of the body, escaping a politic convocation of worms, in time to help receive the other ghost, and to understand then, if any wit is left over in him, that his king was murdered and Hamlet is harping on something besides his daughter. But his absurdity survives, and is voiced by Hamlet in the scenes where the King tries to discover what has become of the body.

The theories which undertake to explain the nature of the "antic disposition" which Hamlet hinted that he might assume do not satisfy me that the heart of that mystery has been plucked out. But the key to it may be read engrossed upon his tablets. The subsequent behavior of Hamlet is the exact counterpart in Irony of the conviction that was so suddenly thrust upon him, and terribly emphasized by his father, that a man may smile and be a villain. To this point let a few pages of explanation be accorded.

In the first place, I notice that the behavior of Hamlet, which has the reputation of being feigned, is a genuine exercise of Irony, and consequently covers a feeling and purpose that are directly opposite to its tone of lightness; but it results organically from Hamlet's new experience, and does not require to be premeditated as madness would be. We see his vigorous and subtle mind set open by the revelations of the ghost; but it is too well hung to be slamming to and fro in gusts of real madness, and its normal movement shuts out the need of feigning. When his father first tells that he has been murdered, we find that Hamlet thinks himself quite capable of decision: there is no infirmity of purpose in that early mood to sweep to his revenge "with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love." What is it that converts this mood into an irresoluteness which contrives the whole suspense, and in fact gives us the whole tragedy? First, partly, that his father tells Hamlet he was murdered by his own brother. Then the question of revenge becomes more difficult to settle, especially as it involves widowing his mother; and it is noticeable that the father himself, who afterwards deplored Hamlet's irresolution, had previously made suggestions to him which hampered his action by constraining him to feel how complicated the situation was. The father's caution runs thus:—

"But, howsoever thou pursu'st this act, Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive Against thy mother aught: leave her to Heaven, And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, To prick and sting."

This does not inhibit Hamlet from dealing retribution on the uncle, but clogs a mind so sensitive with the drawback of consideration for the wife: she is evidently no accomplice or confidant of the murder; that is clear from the uniform respect, and even tenderness, which the ghost craves for her.

But though Hamlet thinks that he is capable of decision, he is so only when the case presented to his meditation is so direct and plain that no chance for a fencing-match of motives is involved. The conviction which justifies his prophetic soul half disarms it. When the uncle is at his prayers, Hamlet might "do it, pat;" but the opportunity is too favorable: it paralyzes a mind of his consideration. He cannot bear to rush upon a man's back whose face is bent towards an act that has a savor of salvation in it. But when Polonius was concealed behind the arras and cried out, Hamlet impulsively utilized the moment of hatred of the supposed eavesdropper; but, finding he had killed the wrong man, his swift action passes into that impetuous arraignment of his mother which follows, and thus expends itself upon the nearest object. He took Polonius for his better, but his resolve is "sicklied o'er" by this mistake; and an almost blunted purpose proves seasonable armor for the King. People of far less nice reflection than Hamlet had would feel hampered by such an accident. It is in the nature of all of us to find a passion grow cool beneath the drift of an untoward cloud; so that I cannot conceive that Shakspeare meant to develop the whole tragedy out of an over-scrupulosity of speculation. The ghost himself, whose latest visitation is but to whet Hamlet's revenge, again diverts him from that point by bidding him turn and look where amazement sits upon his mother:—

"Oh, step between her and her fighting soul! Speak to her, Hamlet."

And an arrowy current from a long accumulating heart sweeps through the midnight hours. Then, by the light of the succeeding day, we observe that Hamlet's mind has recovered its strain of irony: it passes for the flightiness that gets him despatched to England, where all the people are as mad as he. But Hamlet's nerves, though delicately spun, are spun of some toughness that never snaps nor ravels. His pulse "doth temperately keep time, and makes as healthful music" as any man's.

Throughout the play, a refined superiority is the keynote of his character. The "heavy-headed revel" of the Danes seems to him a custom "more honored in the breach than the observance," though he is to the manner born and has a head not easily overthrown. He says to his fellow-students, "We'll teach you to drink deep ere you depart." But he keeps himself aloof from contracting a habit. The same speech contains traces of the observation exercised by a soul that is sustained by the sound pith of virtue. It often chances, he says, that one vicious mole of nature is the fly in the ointment of the apothecary, and undoes all the noble substance. His tendency to speculate upon suicide belongs to a mind in which conscience is so supreme and strong that its ideal makes life scarcely tolerable. But there is no feeble whimper in the tone, nor when his friends are trying to dissuade him from following the ghost; he routs them and all our cowardice at once:

"Why, what should be the fear? I do not set my life at a pin's fee; And, for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal as itself?"

Yes, we—already the ghosts—are a match for any ghost. Self-poised and self-sufficing, his ambition is to occupy the kingdom of a mind. "O God! I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space." And, in the midst of the torrent that bursts from him to overwhelm his mother, there is that smooth, still eddy, "Forgive me this my virtue," and all the stars of his soul look down into it.

Shakspeare plainly meant us to infer that Hamlet had inherited the traits of a noble father: for who but such a son could describe with impetuous remembrance the kingly qualities which had given birth to him? In his mind's eye, he could always see this father:—

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this: See what a grace was seated on this brow! A combination and a form, indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband."

He is that man's son, and not his mother's.

"Ha! have you eyes?"

What devil was it that made you seize upon this other man in a game of blindfold?

"A slave, that is not twentieth part the tithe Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings! A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole And put it in his pocket."

Look there! The dear hallucination of fatherhood! "What would you, gracious figure?" The ghost has come to put this sketch of memory into italics; as if filial appreciation had projected it upon the midnight, in the intensity of recalling his majestic soul. Only a son who was in all respects worthy to be born of Nature's nobleman could pay this debt of being nobly born, and give Imagination's birth to such a sire. See there, he is born! the son is father and mother: inbred posterity conceives its ancestor.

Thus I venture to suppose that, when Hamlet came to his mother, Shakspeare had not deliberated that the ghost would join the party. But his brain kindled with the midnight passion, streamed over down into the pen, and the ink exhaled under the heat of Hamlet's reminiscence into the vaporous outline, which always startles us because it startled Shakspeare,—a sudden whiteness running high along the edge of Hamlet's swelling heart. The scene then shudders with deference to this unexpected presence, which only the son who conceived it can observe. Afterward the verse seems to become merely a coast to help the great wave fall back and subside.

It is possible to have Hamlet played in a style so greatly absorbed as to obliterate our knowledge that the father's custom is to take his cue from the climax of his son's speech and to appear. Then we reproduce the thrill that Shakspeare felt when he sat alone with awe and silence, and they suddenly drew him to their ghost.

I recur now to consider the nature of the oblique and enigmatic style into which Hamlet has fallen. It is not a deliberate effort to sustain the character of a madman, because such a person as Hamlet could find no motive in it: he could not need it to mask his desire to avenge the ghost, for he is Prince, an inmate of the palace, and supernaturally elected to be master of the situation. He says he has "cause and will and strength and means to do't." I conceive, then, that his mind, driven from its ordinary gravity, and the channel of his favorite thoughts diverted, instinctively saves itself by this sustained gesture of irony; and it appears to be madness only to those who do not know that he is well informed of the event, and is struggling to set free from it a purpose. And why should a man of such a well-conditioned brain, a noticer of nice distinctions, have selected for a simulation of madness a style which, nicely estimated, is not mad? He could not calculate that everybody would interpret this difference from his usual deportment into an unsettling of his wits; for the style shows unconsciousness and freedom from premeditation. If he wished to feign distraction, he would have taken care to mar the appositeness of his ironical allusions, which are always in place and always logical. And, if he was half unhinged without knowing it, his speech would have betrayed the same inconsequence. Nowhere is he so abrupt, or delivers matter so remote from an immediate application, that he seems to us to wander, because we too have been admitted to the confidences of the ghost, and share that advantage over the other characters.

Since this essay was written, I have found, in the highly suggestive "Shakspeare-Studien" of Otto Ludwig, the following remarks, which are closely related to my own treatment of the subject, and provide some additional reflections:—

"Hamlet's subjective tendency is so predominant that we are surprised when he alleges no motive for assuming madness; nor is it elsewhere accounted for. It would have served his purpose much better if he had feigned a comfortable and contented, rather than an unsettled, mind. And, on the whole, one cannot at any point detect a reason why he chooses any active dissimulation. For he merely needed to remain undiscovered.

"We never hear him once reflecting upon his intention, though he runs to reflection on all topics. Just after the apparition, he merely remarks to his friends that, if he should appear to them to do strange things, they need not remark upon it so as to betray his object." Ludwig here alludes to the lines,—

"As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on."

Hamlet tells them not to seem too wise about it. The theory of premeditated madness rests upon this passage, and upon one other, which will be noticed. But suppose that Shakspeare did at first entertain a purpose, borrowed from the old chronicle, of disguising Hamlet in some unusual vein, the psychological necessities of his character decided what that vein must be, as they also decided against the old chronicle in the matter of introducing a ghost. And Hamlet's mental quality is really shown by the vein into which it imperatively runs. He was overmastered and completely occupied by this mood of indignation at all the villainous cants of a smiling world. The temper grew so compactly beneath Shakspeare's pen that he could not interpolate into it any amateur simulations. The poet would not, if he could, have so diluted the terribly gathering sincerity which left that epithet of "antic" beached high up and disqualified for floating on its tide.

On Elsinore's platform, Hamlet felt that the sudden complication would put him into strange behavior; he did not know exactly what, but he perceived it coming on. Such a man estimates himself more shrewdly than the crowd imagines. He was aware of a mind that over-refined and idealized, and of a disposition to avoid too close realities. Any hint of nature or society sufficed to sequester him in a monologue. But now he felt some modification passing through him; it is scarcely yet articulate, but it is inevitable to a man of his quality. Hamlet may call his mood by whatever phrases suit the different emergencies; but, in the main, it is the breaking-up of his mind's customary exercise into ironical scorn at discovering the rottenness of Denmark.

The Greek word εἱρωνεἱα, whence our Irony is derived with its special meaning, had not yet been modernly grafted on the Saxon stem. Ben Jonson says:—

"Most Socratic lady! Or, if you will, ironick!"

For the words irony, ironick, were at first used in English, and quite sparingly, to express the method of Socrates in conducting an argument; that is, by eliciting from an opponent his own refutation by asking him misleading questions. The words, in any sense, are not found in Shakspeare. Lord Bacon, in one instance, uses irony nearly in the modern sense; and that is Socratic only so far as a thing is said with an intent the reverse of its ostensible meaning.

The other passage upon which the theory of premeditated madness rests occurs in the great scene with his mother, Act III. 4, during which she becomes convinced that Hamlet is out of his senses by seeing him kill the good Polonius, and hearing him rave as if he saw a spectre. She was the earliest of the critics and experts who are profoundly convinced of his madness. At the close of the scene, it occurs to him to avail himself of her misapprehension to procure continued immunity from any suspicion of design against the King. How shall he do this,—how contrive to clinch her conviction of his madness, and send her reeking with it to inform the King? His subtle intelligence does at this point invent the only simulation of madness that the play contains. He is just about to bid the Queen good-night: "So, again, good-night." Then the device occurs to him: "One word more, good lady;" and the Queen, turning, says, "What shall I do?"

"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do: Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed; Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse; And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, Make you to ravel all this matter out, That I essentially am not in madness, But mad in craft. 'Twere good you let him know."

This is the very craftiness of a madman, to try to convince people that, if he ever seems to be insane, it is for a sane motive. Hamlet reckons that the Queen is so deeply imbued with the idea of his insanity as to interpret this disclaimer of his into the strongest confirmation. Hamlet, moreover, not only seems to be accounting for symptoms of madness, but to be making a confidant of his mother; he begs her not to betray the secret object of his strange behavior. This seems to her to be the very quintessence of madness, to confess to her that he is feigning it out of craft, and to suppose that she would not apprise her husband, who must be the special object of that craft and most in danger from it. He must be indeed preposterously mad; so in parting she pretends to receive his confidential disclosure:—

"Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, And breath of life, I have no life to breathe What thou hast said to me."

She may safely promise that, when she means to repair to the King with quite a different version of Hamlet's condition, the very one upon which he counts to keep the King deceived. And in the next scene she conveys her strong impression to him:—

King. What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet? Queen. Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend Which is the mightier. In his lawless fit, Behind the arras hearing something stir, He whips his rapier out, and cries, "A rat!" And in his brainish apprehension kills The unseen good old man.

She is the mother of the physiological criticism which issues from insane asylums to wonder why Hamlet is not an inmate: and Hamlet himself, by deceiving his mother, furnished to psychological criticism the text that he was mad in craft. Between the lines of the genuine Hamlet you can read that Shakspeare belonged to neither school.

Hamlet gives us unconsciously an opportunity to infer his ability to frame the incoherences which real madness suggests to one who would feign it. It occurs directly upon the Queen's suspicion, who, being unable to see her husband's ghost standing in her chamber, exclaims,—

"This is the very coinage of your brain: This bodiless creation ecstasy Is very cunning in."

Hamlet, repelling the insinuation, says,—

"It is not madness That I have uttered: bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word, which madness Would gambol from."

And herein he implies that as he can construct the phrases of sanity, being all the time of a sound mind, so the soundness would serve him to invent the non sequiturs of madness. If, then, he purposed to feign it when he said that perhaps he might hereafter put on an antic disposition, the reader may ask why so subtle a person did not carry out his plan. No doubt, it occurred to him that, as he travelled towards his purpose, his demeanor must be of the kind that would cover up his traces. But he could baffle Polonius and the other spies by the natural penetration of a mind that suspicion had sharpened. Those emergencies did not call for any style of feigning. It is enough for him to finger the ventages of a recorder and invite Guildenstern to play upon it; the latter understands that he knows no touch of Hamlet, and leaves the heart of that mystery to be voiced by the varying breaths of critics.

When Hamlet explains to Polonius that he is reading slanders, and then describes the old man himself as having a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams, yet holds it hardly fair to have it thus set down,—"For yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward,"—Polonius, who is nothing if not satirical upon himself, muses apart, saying, "Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't;" and there he blundered as patly into Shakspeare's secret as he did into his own death.

And why do so many actors make Hamlet appear to be conscious of the manɶuvre to throw Ophelia in his way that the King and Polonius may mark his tone from the place where they hide? Shakspeare has left no loop-hole for this supposition that Hamlet, observing the trick, assumes a tone of flightiness towards Ophelia, in order to throw off the spies and make them infer that he is mad. The scene being over, the King is wrong when he says,—

"Love! his affections do not that way tend;"

but right when he adds,—

"Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little, Was not like madness."

Of course it was not; and the whole scene with Ophelia is ruined for Shakspeare's purpose by this modern contrivance of the theatre to deprive Hamlet of his spontaneous and uncalculating mood.

Otto Ludwig notices that his madness is "alluded to by Ophelia as having broken out between the first and second acts; and that is another strange thing in Shakspeare. Then, too, the style, if it was dissimulation, is such as to bring to pass the opposite of what he seems to have intended. So far from being disguised by it he is rather betrayed. And what is the use of any feigning when he does things like that of contriving the mock play? For that betrays him to the King more than it does the King to him. It makes the situation all awry, because the King must now know on what footing he is with Hamlet. At all events, the courtiers keep telling how danger is threatened to the King from Hamlet: they have no means of fathoming the King's offence. They merely presage some danger to the King, and they manifest no surprise. Hamlet must be conscious that he would be in great peril if the King knew that he knew every thing; the King would be put on his defence, and he was quite capable of contriving another murder to forestall retribution for the first one. Why, then, does he keep on feigning? Yet we do not observe that he hits upon any expedients to meet this possible case; it does not even occur to him before he concocts the trial-scene."

Ophelia thinks that she sees

"That noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,"

because she cannot understand his unflattering talk that appears to be disclaiming any regard for her and any desire to marry her. In all those sentences that make such a coarse rupture with love and soil the previous sentiment of their intercourse, there is no trace of a distracted mind. How could we expect this maid to be prepared to entertain such monstrous irony? It was as much Shakspeare's intention to have him misunderstood as to represent him so occupied by the sweeping scepticism that follows the disclosure of villainy. This irony of the most sombre kind, the mental mood that corresponds to such a harsh awakening, was not customary with Hamlet, who was by nature mirthful before this murder happened.

And notice how this ironical tone is kept up by him all through Ophelia's misconception, into which she falls because Hamlet's mood is too overpowering, and she thinks he has a wrecked brain from which she can rescue nothing to enable her to claim the salvage of loving him. When he meets her after many days of unaccountable neglect, she returns the few remembrances which were messengers of the happier hours of his affection, but he casts discredit upon these sacred tokens. He never meant them, in fact he never gave her any thing. But she says, "Yes,"

"And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd, As made the things more rich."

Has the bloom been rubbed from them, and their perfume lost? Then, says the self-respecting maid, tearing the presents by bleeding roots out of the heart where they had lodged to fructify, take them again,

"For to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind."

"I did love you once," he says. "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so." Hamlet is enraged at his own love, and appears to have discarded it, for that too may smile and be a villain, or hers may. "You should not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but we shall relish of it." That is to say, if I had felt true love grafted on my stem I should have received and imparted its flavor of sincerity. But nothing is sincere: "I loved you not."

Hamlet's observation of human nature had furnished him with elements which only needed provocation to develop into this uncompromising irony. His mother, married to that satyr of an uncle,

"Or ere those shoes were old, With which she follow'd my poor father's body,"

might well cast a slur upon the sex in his opinion, and prompt the text which cynics use, "Frailty, thy name is woman,"—all but Ophelia: it does not include her until all life's illusions vanished with the ghost. Then she would do well not to walk in the sun, and would be safest in a nunnery.

Previous to that, he had dispatched a missive to her, which is commonly supposed to have been written on purpose to foster the notion that he was mad. But its tone does not seem to me to have been rightly interpreted. It begins in the style of Pistol: "To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." Then comes a verse fit for a valentine,—

"Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love."

So far the mocking spirit of his irony does not fail him. But the mood changes, for this was written just after the scene in Ophelia's chamber when he seemed to bid her an eternal farewell. Remembering this, he breaks the tone and adds, "O dear Ophelia! I am ill at these numbers: I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, oh! most best, believe it." So with impetuous emphasis he confessed afterward upon Ophelia's grave. Nothing could more precisely convey to us his mental condition than this mixture of moods.

In the churchyard scene, we observe that Hamlet recurs unconsciously to his ordinary mental disposition, because he is alone there with Horatio, whose grave and silent friendship is congenial. It is the foil to Hamlet's restless speculation; it calls a truce to the civil war between his temper and his purpose. He is pacified in the society of Horatio, who gives him a chance to recur to his native mental habit. As he naively pours out his thoughts, how little does Horatio answer! as little as the ground beneath their feet, less laconic than the lawyer's skull. He is a continent upon which Hamlet finds that he can securely walk, the only domain in Denmark that is not honeycombed with pitfalls. Turning toward Horatio's loyal affection, he feels a response that is articulated without words. As little need the forest reply to her lover save in dumb show and in obscure reflex of feeling.

The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air disarms and dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we see that Hamlet was naturally more inclined to that use of satire which indicates an ideal far lifted above the methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the lawyer, and we acknowledge the satirical tone of an exalted mind. And this lends to that scene a feeling that in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes the usual tone which always advertised him to his friends. To them his long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken by so few sallies of his healthy satire, was additional confirmation of his madness because it was so unusual with him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind; they were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that Polonius hurried to show his insapiency by attributing the craze to love for his daughter. 'Tis very likely, they all thought, for they could refer to no other probable cause for it.

It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony that Shakspeare has expressed the effect of an apparition, and of the disenchanting news it brought, upon a mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of madness. Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow; but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of madness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,—that is, the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction! He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well,—he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale fish.

If we return to a period in the play which follows closely upon the scene of the taking of the oath, Ophelia herself will discover for us the turning mood in Hamlet's character. The time and action of the piece allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath-taking to visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that bloodless and freezing visitation to see life heaving in a dear bosom and reddening in lips which he had love's liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes down from the hills to choke the running of sweet streams, deface with stains of mud all natural beauties, and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the meadows spangled with forget-me-nots. His love for Ophelia was the most mastering impulse of his life: it stretched like a broad, rich domain, down to which he came from the shadowy places of his private thought to fling himself in the unchecked sunshine, and revel in the limpid bath of feeling. How often, in hours which only over-curious brooding upon the problems of life had hitherto disquieted, had he gone to let her smile strip off the shadow of his thought, and expose him to untroubled nature! The moisture of her eyes refreshed his questioning; her phrases answered it beyond philosophy; a maidenly submission of her hand renewed his confidence; an unspoken sympathy of her reserve, that flowed into the slight hints and permissions of her body, nominated him as lover and disfranchised him as thinker; and a sun-shower seemed to pelt through him to drift his vapors off. But this open gladness has disappeared underneath the avalanche of murder which a ghostly hand had loosened. He ventures down to the place where he remembers that it used to expect him; but we know that it has disappeared. His air and behavior announce it to us. The catastrophe seems to have swept even over his person, to dishevel the apparel upon that "mould of form." In this ruin of his life Ophelia is the first one buried; for she was always more resident in his soul than maintained within a palace, and his soul is no longer habitable.

Polonius has just been giving those scandalous instructions to his pimp to waylay the Danes in Paris, and, by insinuations of ill-conduct in Laertes, worm out of them possible admissions of its truth. He wants to know how his son is spending money in the gay capital, how many times he gamed, was overtaken in drink, or visited "a house of sale." The pimp is to draw on his fellow-countrymen by pretending that Laertes is given to all these things: he knows the man; 'tis the common talk about him at home; you cannot surprise him by any thing you say. Says the old manœuvrer:

"See you now; Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth: And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, With windlasses, and with assays of bias, By indirections find directions out."

No wonder that Hamlet in the churchyard, kicking the pate of a politician, called it something "that would circumvent God." The state-craft of old Polonius has lived so long without a change that its garments are dropping from its limbs. Now see what an indecent forked radish it is. But the scene is eminently in its place, and has nothing incongruous with what transpires before or after; for the incident is cunningly contrived to prepare us to find him applying his principle of the windlass and indirect purchase to the relation of Hamlet with his daughter; and it breeds in us a contempt for the notion that the Prince has been made mad by love.

Ophelia enters to her father:

"Oh, my lord, my lord! I have been so affrighted!"

Then she describes Lord Hamlet entering with garments all disordered,

"And with a look so piteous in purport, As if he had been loosed out of hell, To speak of horrors.... He took me by the wrist, and held me hard; Then goes he to the length of all his arm; And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow, He falls to such perusal of my face, As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so; At last,—a little shaking of mine arm, And thrice his head thus waving up and down,— He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound, That it did seem to shatter all his bulk, And end his being. That done, he lets me go: And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd, He seem'd to find his way without his eyes; For out of doors he went without their help, And, to the last, bended their light on me."

Polonius decides that it is the very ecstasy of love. Yes, it is, but ecstasy that has made an assignation with despair. The two feelings meet at the rendezvous of Ophelia's description, where they display to us the yearning scrutiny that a man throws into the eyes of an expiring love: it is too passionately dear to be surrendered into the inane; it is too selfishly personal to be consistent with his future purpose. For he had married a bride at midnight who is still expecting him. It is the consummation of one murder by another. For such a bridal as that, to leave her cheeks on which the color comes and goes between her love and his renunciation, "like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set," seems to shatter and end his being. But let him fall to such perusal of her face as he may, he sees the complexion of the ghost through each warm feature; and its pallor stands even there to wave him apart to an interview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for rascally things may smile. He shades his brow, and his eyes are two magnets which he detaches from her heart, as he surrenders his last confidence in a stale and unprofitable world.

The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the second scene of the third act, where Hamlet avails himself of the arrival of play-actors to test the King with his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian mechanics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple intention of contributing their duty and homage to the nuptials. We see the humor of its juxtaposition with courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet, in his interlude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to conceal his knowledge of the real one. "No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no offence in the world." His light talk with Ophelia is nothing but the audacity of excitement and expectation. His baffling of Guildenstern with the pipe; his making Polonius see a camel, a weasel, and a whale in a cloud,—covers the dreadful necessity which drives him, in the witching time of night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and that second meeting with a dead father, which will make men's breath bate and their veins creep while English is spoken in this world.

What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened with the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into the geniality of Humor,—all his mirth lost of late, there is no resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone is sane.

But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.

"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious and ennobling things,—too much so to grow deranged, enough so to create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.

The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full of pompous platitudes about Laertes,—"an absolute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose macaronic manner he assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."

I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.

But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds which took up so readily with the theory of Hamlet's madness; all of them incapable of irony, therefore not competent to fly into his meaning; limited, like the dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the plain appearance. "Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him," says Osrick.

So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death with a presentiment which his soul was great enough to put aside, and also give him breath to say how great it was: "We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." No crotchet of real or assumed madness could lurk in the repose of such a man.

FOOTNOTES:

THE PORTER IN "MACBETH," THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT," THE FOOL IN "LEAR."

THE PORTER IN "MACBETH."

The vulgarity of the Porter's language, in the third scene of the second act, repelled Coleridge, who pronounced it to be an after-thought of some baser hand. "I dare pledge myself to demonstrate," said he, that it was an interpolation of the actors. Other critics have followed with the same feeling of condemnation. But only Shakspeare could have risen above such a conventional estimate, and have put this piece of solid consistency into that part of the tragedy which it strengthens: there it stays in the only place where Nature could have lent to it her justification. We can readily admit that the undisguised lechery of Pandarus in "Troilus and Cressida," and the brothel scenes in "Pericles," were subsequent additions to those plays by a pen that was accustomed to deal in broad effects without regard to the organic exaction of the other characters. Perhaps they were fragments of older plays left over by carelessness, or, what is much more likely, introduced as gags by the play-actors. But we can spare them out of the legacy of Shakspeare because they are not in the manner which he used when broadness served his purpose. When the gross details are hung over and fondled lewdly, recurred to morbidly, laid open with ingenious particularity till we detect the sickening odor of the dissecting-room which rises from slashed and naked subjects, we may determine at once that the scene preserves not one stroke of Shakspeare's pen. The lines seem suffocating in a close and tainted place. What a brisk draught ventilates the honest coarseness of the Porter! what a light, bantering touch hits off the vice which is needful to finish the portrait of Falstaff! Even Parolles, his prototype, only ventures far enough to make a scene coherent with Helena's unspoken thought.[8]

Let us see if Nature was not fortunate in finding the Porter at his post at an hour when he was needed as never before.

The air around the castle of Macbeth "nimbly and sweetly" recommended itself to Duncan's senses; and Banquo noticed that the swallow, most confiding and unsuspicious of birds, approves the place "by his lov'd mansionry." On every frieze, buttress, coigne of vantage, Nature had colonized this domestic wing, as if to hint to the wayfarer "a pleasant seat," peace and unviolated sleep within. But we remember that a raven had croaked the fatal entrance of Duncan into the castle. The swallows twittering in the delicate air cannot drown this omen of insecurity: as we enter with the unconscious Duncan, the weird sisters slip by us from their blasted heath, and the house darkens with a fated purpose.

It was an unruly night, and the owl clamored the livelong hours. Towards morning, after the accomplishment of the murder, Lady Macbeth snatched the bloody daggers from the hand of her husband to carry them back into the chamber. The air that was interrupted at the lips of the gracious Duncan seems breathless as he, appalled at the deed; and our consciousness of it sinks into an awful silence. Just then a knocking at the gate is heard.

De Quincey, in an essay "On the Knocking at the Gate," rightly notices that it reflects "back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and depth of solemnity," and he explains this effect. "When the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard, and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them."

Admirable as this criticism is to justify the profound art of Shakspeare, it does not seem to me entirely to exhaust the effect produced by the knocking. It not only makes known to us that human life recurs, and thus emphasizes our sense of the unhuman world of murder, but it also startles us with the sudden consciousness that the human which thus recurs does it in entire ignorance of the scene at which it knocks. That makes us catch our breath, to feel how thoughtlessly life is about to stumble into the tremendous scene. What a contrast of innocent unconsciousness,—so innocent, so remote from the event, that we should think it was impertinent if our pity for the shock it brings upon itself did not prevail! We wonder who will first discover what has occurred, whether man or woman; somebody is doomed to blunder into the ghastliness of that room where Macbeth murdered sleep. What will be the sensation that thrills from the inhospitable bed around which the angels of honor and loyalty ought to have watched with spotless wings? Some one steps into this pool where all the safeguards and trusts of human life lie drenched. How will he manage to escape from it, and will the tongue be palsied "with the act of fear" to refuse to the lips words adequate to express the villainy? And yet this must be done.

We therefore become aware of this additional feeling, that the life which knocks at the gate, though unconscious, is pregnant with the design of an overruling Power; just for a moment, there seems to be the supernatural arrival of something with a commission to detect the murder. Every knock smites the bare heart of Macbeth, who may well exclaim, "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st!"

Shakspeare makes another world for Macbeth,—a sequestered hell. The knocking announces the existence and reappearance of another life, as De Quincey notices; but he does not note the fine prolongation of the Hell into the humorous fancy of the Porter who comes to open the gate.

To the old French taste, this Porter was one of the Shakspearean violations of decency and tragic sentiment,—a vulgar fellow who has been waked out of a drunken sleep, and who talks outrageous matter that is the farthest removed from murder, so that solemnity is affronted and abruptly leaves the hearts which it had just monopolized. But the more we dwell upon Shakspeare's characters, "the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement, where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident."

The Porter, as if he had been privy to the transactions of the night, translates each knock into a candidate for admission into his quaint fancy of a hell, of which he keeps the gate. Fleay, in his "Shakspeare's Manual," shows that the Porter makes allusions to contemporaneous circumstances of the year 1606, when "Macbeth" was first produced. "The expectation of plenty:" wheat, barley, and malt were extraordinarily cheap. The "equivocator" is the Jesuit, Garnet, who was tried for gunpowder treason in that year. "Stealing out of a French hose:" the fashion of hose became short in 1606; yet the tailors took the old measure of material and cabbaged the difference. So that the Porter belongs to that year, and could not have been subsequently interpolated.

"If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have often turning the key. Who's there?" "An equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven! Oh, come in, equivocator!" Yes, this is the very house for him to come to, where a treason has just been committed which will be unable to equivocate to Heaven. "I'll devil-porter it no farther: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire." If the outer life is to gain admission at all again to this castle, this grotesque hint of the hell within undoes the gate appropriately: by no abrupt transition, and by the bridge of a perilous smile, human life is reached again. The Porter delays by his successive fancies, till we begin to grow impatient, like those emissaries of Heaven who shiver at the gate. This impatience, humorously created for us, introduces another human feeling to qualify our awe; and thus we rejoin our common humanity.

When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,—a very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked him." Then our feeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able to take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Macbeth's feigned unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon us with his horror. Moreover, the carousing which the Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's opportunity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, while we think how innocently drunk the whole household was to provide a human weakness for an act of death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived the stratagem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. An after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's traces; but he has performed his function by letting life and human nature in upon the sexless and monstrous scene, and may now vacate his post.

Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot be accepted by a taste that is more fastidious than the world itself is. But, if the world chooses to be vulgar, why needed Shakspeare to have imported this base touch of realism into his art? Only by the permission of Humor, and the justification of an exigency to drag our feelings back to life by the handiest strand, however coarse it may be. And after he had invented that thrilling moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot get along without the house-porter, who is the only one awake enough to let honest Nature in. So we must take him as he is, and admire the poet who did not send the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt.

The Agamemnon of Æschylus reaches a breathless moment of suspense, when Clytemnestra has left the scene to plan the murder of her husband, and the Chorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, expresses our expectation. All at once a stifled exclamation struggles out from the interior of the palace: the Chorus whispers, "Hush! who is it that cries out, 'A blow'?" and the play soon closes with the sombre feeling unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the spectators back to life, and to the other persons whose interests implicate them so deeply in the plot. There is but one interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy, and when that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted; the poet has no more to say, and is not conscious of any craving for variety in his listeners. His play was an artistic embodiment of the current religious ideas, and so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is, from manifold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor could intrude. The Chorus, listening to the blow, intervenes instead of a Porter. It is the voice of an audience conscious of the crime. So is a modern audience conscious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed through the silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus permitted to mingle in every awful occurrence, and therefore need to be restored again to the ordinary world of justice and emotion.

Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius when he meets this exigency which antique religion did not feel. He admits the free play of life into its real closeness with all our moral and pathetic emotions; but we never find that Humor weakens the religious purpose of the play, as it would if our private anguish were unseasonably interrupted by it, because our personal fortunes are not touched by the tragedy. We are implicated in the scene only by our instinct of observation and sympathy; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck us and became a "fee-grief due to each single breast," we could endure it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a temper that keeps all other strings muted but sorrow. So the Humor which we would not tolerate when the tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen within every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart is so keenly summoned by the mimic scene.

THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT."

The name of the Clown does not appear in the dramatis personæ, and only once in the text, Act ii. 4, where he is called Feste. All the dainty songs of the play are put into his mouth. Feste was the name of a distinguished musician and composer, probably a friend of Shakspeare. We may even surmise that he set to music one or more of his namesake's songs. There is no play which employs the element of music so frequently, or that speaks of it in the tender terms which only a lover of melody can use. It is admitted into the plot as a confidant and adviser, and allowed to sway the moods of the characters.

The Duke calls for Cesario (Viola) to repeat

"That piece of song, That old and antique song we heard last night."

The Duke has forgotten that Feste, and not Cesario, was the singer. Fleay overlooks this touch of nature, and attributes the passage to an older play or first draught, which appears uncorrected in the present play. But the Duke is mooning about in his sentimental fashion, and vaguely recollects that Cesario was presented to him as one that could sing "and speak to him in many sorts of music." He had done so, no doubt, so that the mistake was natural to the distraught mind of the Duke, who seems to allude to it when he says immediately to Cesario,—