WIT, HUMOR, AND SHAKSPEARE. (continued 6)

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:

HELENA; OPHELIA.

HELENA.

The character 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 are the 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 speak His powerful sound within an organ weak: And what impossibility would slay In common sense, sense saves another way. Thy life is dear; for all that life can rate Worth name of life, in thee hath estimate, Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, honor, all That 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 light Must 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 draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In my heart's table,—heart too capable Of 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 Bertram by 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 lie Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull. Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose What 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 not By 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 adore The 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 thorn Doth 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 bloods Of color, weight, and heat, pour'd all together, Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off In differences so mighty: ... Good alone Is 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 heart Durst 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 eye The 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 of Nature 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, even seven women 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 the horizon 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 to school 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 full of 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 about the 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 chalice which 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 his love?" 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 Hamlet enters, 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 wish That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtues Will 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 gentle daughter 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 brothers Could 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 of lover: 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's instinct 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 me Into 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 solid flesh 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, "So much 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 flesh May violets spring,"

to renew the breed which withered with the death of her father.

MACBETH.

MACBETH.

It is 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, and spoiled 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 moon There hangs a vaporous drop profound; I'll catch it ere it come to ground: And that, distill'd by magic sleights, Shall raise such artificial sprites As by the strength of their illusion Shall 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, broader than 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 light At any mischief, there's no villainy But 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 traitor The 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'd With those of Norway; or did line the rebel With hidden help and vantage; or that with both He 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, whose accent 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 run By 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.

It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth as homeward his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, which the rebels against Duncan's rule have just lost, Macbeth has won. What else has he won? His thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will change into witches by the way and inform him. Hitherto his fateful Self has remained vague and disembodied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it utter a threefold "Hail!"

For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had fully infected Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging it into the appalling swiftness of the first scenes of this tragedy, he endowed Macbeth with its own shaping quality. The witches were not decoys of another world to lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were his own intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed a prelude to his deed, as the condition of starving sets a phantom banquet before a person's eyes. Shakspeare had no need of them to start the business of his play or to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their own tempting so thoroughly that spirits might applaud and refrain from interfering. But these witches were characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare imputed to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Macbeth's mind from the conception of this tragedy. The prosaic supernature of the old chronicle, on which the play is based, is transformed into a psychological peculiarity.

So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny lips,—old women dreaded by the common people for reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his age in which it worked. So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."

In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had no personal rapport with her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature: the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,—a show of kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, then.

"From this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand."

But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination to a strict account. You may clap John Locke into the witness-box and riddle him with cross-questions: the same court has no authority to put a poet on oath to justify himself in every line; he is satisfied to let the drift of his thought be traced through the material in which he works. Quartz that is found in certain localities is as good as gold, and rewards us for suspecting it. We need not strain Shakspeare's page into too minute an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it. If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have composed the tragedy before his pen touches the paper, the witches may appear just what we and Macbeth choose to have them,—at one moment concocters of country spells to give him a drench of murder, at another moment concocted themselves by a spell which his soul has brewed.

This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical hesitations. His strongest passion discharges and exhausts itself in a pulse of fantasy; as the electric fish lies awhile torpid after the transmission of a shock. In his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor nerves that run between imagining and doing; so that his milk of human kindness has time to mingle with his mood. When his wife has grown sick and incompetent to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him; as we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of kings, when somebody informs him that Macduff, his most formidable enemy, has fled. This is his self-chiding:—

"Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits: The flighty purpose never is o'ertook, Unless the deed go with it. But no more sights."

Macduff's "wife, children, servants, all that could be found," are slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, making his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But no more sights." He has had enough of them,—too much time wasted in those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV. felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.

Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent supernature which had a relish for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of settling into the definiteness of crime,—"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subterranean motive.

He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn themselves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till Banquo's ghost can recruit them.

Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own plastic mind.

But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, like that which

"If it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"

and though he has become one of those madmen who

"Have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends,"

he is still capable of reverting to this cool reason, at least so far as to appreciate that his desperate dreams are the poetry of desperate consequences which will tax all his waking powers. When the apparitions vanish, in Act iv. 1, one of the witches gives a voice to Macbeth's perturbation; but why

"Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?"

It was but the voice of revulsion from amazement, to "cheer up his sprites" and summon resolution.

When Macbeth originates any thing out of himself, that Self is not daunted, for it is too deeply compromised in fact and fancy. But when some phenomenon threatens him from a quarter that is outside the limit of his own creative power, as when Birnam Wood is descried coming toward Dunsinane, he is puzzled, and says:—

"I pull in resolution; and begin To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend, That lies like truth. I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun."

Nothing has disturbed him till he appreciates that some agency which he does not control can transplant a forest at his castle gate. The apparition of the witches scarcely lifts his eyebrows. "Speak, if you can," is the calm greeting. When he starts, and seems to fear "things that do sound so fair," it is because the shapes he conjures become suddenly endowed with tongues, and he hears his own ambition syllabled. For a man is not proof against shrinking at the first moment that lends to the "airy nothing" of his desire a distinct name and purpose. He is astonished at the audacious phrasing of his hopes, and he resents at first what seems definite enough to be an impeachment from something not himself; yet not until that moment was it really his Self. What phantoms have thus leaped out of vacuity into the midnight chambers of desire! What voices have drawn the startled answers of a crime that did not suspect this overlooking! But when the man's Self has undergone this real birth, and the secret parturition becomes a breathing child of consciousness, he soon accepts his own new self, and forgets that it was irritated into a cry by the first salutes of the atmosphere. Casting away all repugnance, Macbeth exclaims to his wicked wishes, before they have a chance to vanish,—

"Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more! ... Speak, I charge you!"

So the dagger that wavers in the heated air of his soul does not surprise him,—"Come, let me clutch thee!" Really, he expected to grasp it; for it was precisely the kind of instrument he thought of using, the very shape and workmanship thereof. There's nothing to perturb until he draws from his belt its counterpart, yet sees the other still solid in the air. That sets him to pondering: his

"Eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest."

But, in spite of that, the murder in his brain reddens, sprinkles the blade and dudgeon with drops of blood, "which was not so before." Now when the illusion becomes the most intense, it is dispersed, as if the brain's own climax swelled to breaking. The collapse reminds him that the deed still waits to be accomplished: his dagger is yet clean. But its form is the bloody business which he has on hand to get through with before sweet morning. It seemed so clearly cut in his mind, and stayed so long before he could turn it out, that he thought it worth describing to his wife, as she indicates to us when at the banquet she calls his vision of Banquo

"Proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said, Led you to Duncan."

Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy Macbeth's chair, the actor of the king's part need not strain himself to put on the highest degree of an appalled feeling. "Are you a man?" whispers his wife; and Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the scene when he answers,—

"Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that Which might appal the devil."

He starts, to be sure; but he simply remarks, "The table's full." "Here is a place reserved, sir." "Where?" he exclaims, so little annihilated by the painting of his own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when a mirror shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes: they blink, and judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, "Which of you have done this?" He is not "distilled to jelly with the act of fear," but simply amazed at this reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that, put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:—

"Thou canst not say I did it: never shake Thy gory locks at me."

His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:—

"Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too."

This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror.

In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was so fluent with these bodiless creations that he had naturalized the night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo must re-enter precisely when Macbeth drinks to the general joy, and to the dead man in particular. Shakspeare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine and all his hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand to strike the goblet from his grasp. It was the very nick of time, but it was in the man's own temper.

Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor from astonishment to the abjectness of a guilty terror slips out of Macbeth's conviviality into the company, as he calls for wine and drinks "love and health to all." At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his consciousness of murder: he is in a frame to enjoy proposing the health of

"Our dear friend, Banquo, whom we miss; Would he were here!"

Now this pretence of desiring Banquo's presence uses up what resistance Macbeth has to spare. No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he imagines how they might be answered: the imagining it is the vivid answer. When you try jauntily to job off suspicion before other persons, the cheek grows pale with dread of being contradicted. A door is thrown ajar by this wind of pretending that nothing has been committed. Come on, there! the villain cries. Has any thing happened? Is anybody outside? Let him enter and take a look around! Sure enough, 'tis there: his mind's eye sees it enter. Even when the small faults of social life are denied or disclaimed by us, a ghost is raised upon the face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive eye, or just a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most people overestimate their strength to make a flat denial of misdeeds when their soul is reflected in the polished mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal look which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and sends him to jail before he knows that he has been apprehended.

Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve a smug complacency after the commission of a crime, because they cannot vibrate to it. Give a stroke to their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud. Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no showery gusts or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth was delicately strung: the slightest stir of the invisible air was registered by a vibration. When the ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat,—this coming at the toast, "to the general joy of the whole table," at this pretence of thirst to drink a dead man's welfare; too nicely timed for flesh and blood to bear; too suggestive of continual liability to see the eyes glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how easily the awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, he cries, "Take any shape but that!" And his mind is desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal mockery," and vainly struggles with his own personifying power.

"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."

It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, bloodless, but alert in a shape against which Macbeth's nerves at any time may stumble, on the midnight staircase, in the gallery's pale shimmer, in sleep between his wife and his embrace, and always at his own suggestion of a phrase, a dream. His fancy never yet inflicted such a frightful recoil of an offended Heaven. It comes at his own invitation; for he had said in the forenoon of that day,—

"To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir, And I'll request your presence;"

to which Banquo acquiesced,—

"Lay your highness' Command upon me." "Fail not our feast." "My lord, I will not."

On the way to it he was a little delayed by being murdered; but, though late, he does not fail.

This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married life of Macbeth and his Lady. Their ambitious desires spent years in collusion before an heir of opportunity was born to them. The rapid and breathless action of the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in the wave that combs to break into this sweeping surge. The movement of the play is unnatural, unless we admit that the married couple have grown familiar with many projects, all of which make them languish for occasion. Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance offered he possesses every other quality to supplant Duncan,—ambition, audacity, swiftness, all good fortune, except a turn of circumstance. He discovers at the juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man?

"What beast was it, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man; ... Nor time, nor place, Did then adhere, and yet you would make both; They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you."

Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber. We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have the coupling which makes up wishing and doing into one train; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the track. The track which emerged from Hamlet's resolution met so many diverging lines at the controlling switch that he was in doubt upon which to run: at length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set the rail for a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing became linked to acting, he was not over-nice about his route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could not start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to vapor and began to move, blundered with a full head of fantasy into ruin.

When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified; but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope, implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but

"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"

His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,—away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break.

The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "and shalt be what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.

Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,—that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because

"He hath honored me of late; and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon."

He discusses the project of murdering Banquo in the same way:—

"Though I could With bare-fac'd power sweep him from my sight, And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not, For certain friends that are both his and mine, Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall, Whom I myself struck down."

His wife must needs have sore dealings with such a non-committal spirit:—

"Thou'd'st have, great Glamis, That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it; And that which rather thou dost fear to do, Thou wishest should be undone.'"

He wants to win a game to which his hand does not entitle him; and the desire to win is as great as the dread of cheating.

This tainted mood of her beloved husband makes her almost frantic. Dreams satisfy her thirst as the mirage quenches the craving of a caravan. Here comes my Macbeth and—"thou'rt mad to say it"—Duncan with him,—a lifetime's opportunity: 'twill never come again. Heaven drives Duncan "under my battlements,"—yes, mine, for this night only; Macbeth's at every other time, but mine this once, to hold out with against my husband's mood. The raven himself is hoarse with chiding his delay. What need the tone of my language be, when the bird croaks Duncan's fatal entrance? Let it be unsexed. Here I tear every rag of woman's garments from it, in this my frenzy of dread lest Macbeth elude Fate's purpose:—

"Come to my woman's breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on Nature's mischief."

For love's sake her tongue becomes unlovely; and the delicate woman, with blue eyes sparkling like an electric firmament, and that little hand, snatched out of its old dalliance and clenched as if to drive a weapon, is transformed by the spirit of some ruthless Medea who has lent herself to contrive and enjoy another murder.

It has been said that Lady Macbeth did not reflect upon consequences as Macbeth did, because that is not the way of her sex. But the sex varies in this respect. The average woman is less selfish than we are, not from a feebler gift for calculation, but from a stronger capacity of love; for sex was invented before arithmetic. Macbeth reflected, not merely because he was male, but a selfish male, eager to be great, yet admiring to be popular: he would drive the sharpest bargain with Destiny. His wife's impetuous movement of love oversets and spills out her calculation. Many a woman is capable of regarding all the consequences of an act, but she must not love too deeply: if she does, she will stick at nothing. If there be motive enough, she can turn a lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit, unblushing cheek, will screen him: they twain are one, for better, for worse. They are too deeply compromised to haggle about salvation. The very intercourse of sex devotes a woman: she has become flesh and blood of another. This complicity of nature engages the most imperious nerve-centres of her life. Were she aware of this beforehand, as she is not, it would not be evaded nor entitled bondage. If her lover has been always above her suspicion, the discovery on his part of some ill-doing is seldom violent enough to tear this bond: her revulsion is against a prying world that is no better than it should be; and she will help to secrete what she is too proud to have attributed to him. It is one article in the creed of a detective that a man's wife is more baffling than circumstance, more loyal than conscience. She is chaste clear through and single-hearted. Only when love itself is wounded and disgraced will she resign the culprit lover to the scorn of men; but not always even then, for it is her concern, and earth and heaven may keep out of it. But let him forge, she will secrete him, smuggle him out of the country, join him afterward to comfort him. Let him counterfeit any thing but love, and she will help to put the spurious values on the town. Let him come home with murder on his cheek and blood upon his garments, she, fainting, will cleanse the stain that falls athwart her vision like a lurid sunset of her peace. Selfishness would turn informer, but perfect love casts out the fear of becoming that! Do you say this, too, is criminal? I say nothing, because it is my concern only to refer you to the facts. She is a partner, for better, for worse,—married and interpenetrated by the husband's fate. For love is charity: it rejoiceth not in iniquity, and yet it "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. Dodd, wife of that clerical scoundrel of the reign of George II.: "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd, to show them into the dining-room, and say, 'Pray step in, gentlemen! My husband has just come home from church. That bill with my Lord Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound to own, was never written by his lordship; and the signature is in the doctor's handwriting'? I say, would any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his wife for telling the truth under such circumstances? Suppose she made a fine grimace and said, 'Most painful as my position is, most deeply as I feel for my William, yet truth must prevail; and I deeply lament to state that the beloved partner of my life did commit the flagitious act with which he is charged, and is at this present moment located in the two-pair back, up the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.' Why, even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest humbugs who ever lived, would not have had the face to say that he approved of his wife telling the truth in such a case. If ever I steal a teapot, and my women don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be."

A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leæna, a girl of humble birth, beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmodius, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. She "was sentenced to the torture, and, that the pain might not wring from her any confession of the secrets of the conspiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say, What greater sacrifice could a woman make?

But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the poem of Kallistratus,[20] to wreathe around her name the myrtle-bough of the two patriots.

In "Far from the Madding Crowd," a novel written by Thomas Hardy, Bathsheba has hotly denied being in love; but she resents being taken in earnest by her confidant. "O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and my love forgive me! And don't you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?"

Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes itself. Hurried by her husband's hopes, she throws herself without reserve into the abyss they dig at her feet. All her character is lavished to consolidate his state. She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is without a flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman; but she is most perfectly and irrevocably married. The imperfect wives are egotistical, from various motives. They have some knack or talent which craves airing, and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord of a household. Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she loves and is absorbed in.

To be perfectly married, and perfectly bound up in a husband for weal or woe, does not imply loss of personality. Lady Macbeth is still immensely personal, even in the devotion of her love. For love alone preserves the person such as she intrinsically is. A feebler love, a more imperfect attachment, may favor idiosyncrasy, and permit the woman to assert some traits in isolation instead of letting them be merged in the total influence of her attachment. Greater love hath no man—and no woman—than this, that an individuality lays down its life to sustain a personality.

So when Macbeth tells her that he cannot proceed any farther in the business, for Duncan is in the castle, "in double trust," as king and guest,—and, besides, he does not like to risk the golden opinions he has lately won,—her language is an affront to the womanly sentiments which always charmed Macbeth and drew from him such phrases of fondness: all the horrors of this tragedy cannot frighten them from his lips. She is "my dearest love," the "dear wife," and "dearest chuck." After the murderer has told him that Banquo is slain, he falls into musing which she strives to dispel: her words recall to him what a "sweet remembrancer" she is.

Therefore she hammers stern sentences out of the "undaunted mettle" of her love. They are iron levers to swing him out of the slough of his moods: disdainful smitings on the lover's cheek, they are, to bring them up to regal purple:—

"Shame itself! Why do you make such faces?" "Fie! for shame!"

She could never be capable of risking this style if she had not been wont to soothe his ear with words selected by choice moments of inclination. She would fain recur to them, but there must be a coronation first. When the day comes, there will be bystanders and observers, else she would bend over him with the old-time prattle and remarry him as king.

But, "if we should fail," he suggests, revolving possibilities. What deliberate forethought of contempt her answer yields, if it be properly emphasized,—"We fail!" That is, I'll parrot your phrase, and say "we," but out of disdain. Of us two, the one who fails will not be myself. We, indeed! there's one too much of us for that. Only screw your courage to the point, and we, as you say, will not fail.

If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a murder leaves her in our imagination unsexed and brutalized, we deprive ourselves of reasons why he should have loved and married her; for the clouds of moral disaster which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine and noble disposition. It breaks through the gathering obscurity in the delicate considerations which urge him to be a loyal host to Duncan; in the imagination so sensitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly by terrible dreams, as she was too; so quick to mark the objects of Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling; so melted by tender recollections, and capable of noble regrets that call a pause to ruin just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long enough for us to see how much will be ruined:—