A Dish of Orts Part 9

In "Julius Caesar," the death of _Brutus_, while following as the consequence of his murder of _Caesar_, is yet as much distinguished in character from that death, as the character of _Brutus_ is different from that of _Caesar_. _Caesar's_ last words were _Et tu Brute? Brutus_, when resolved to lay violent hands on himself, takes leave of his friends with these words:

"Countrymen, My heart doth joy, that yet, in all my life, I found no man, but he was true to me."

Here Shakspere did not invent. He found both speeches in Plutarch. But how unerring his choice!

Is the final catastrophe in "Hamlet" such, because Shakspere could do no better?--It is: he could do no better than the best. Where but in the regions beyond could such questionings as _Hamlet's_ be put to rest? It would have been a fine thing indeed for the most n.o.bly perplexed of thinkers to be left--his love in the grave; the memory of his father a torment, of his mother a blot; with innocent blood on his innocent hands, and but half understood by his best friend--to ascend in desolate dreariness the contemptible height of the degraded throne, and shine the first in a drunken court!

Before bringing forward my last instance, I will direct the attention of my readers to a pa.s.sage, in another play, in which the lesson of the play I am about to speak of, is _directly_ taught: the first speech in the second act of "As You Like It," might be made a text for the exposition of the whole play of "King Lear."

The banished duke is seeking to bring his courtiers to regard their exile as a part of their moral training. I am aware that I point the pa.s.sage differently, while I revert to the old text.

"Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam-- The season's difference, as the icy fang, And churlish chiding of the winter's wind?

Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say-- This is no flattery; these are counsellors That feelingly persuade me what I am.

Sweet are the uses of adversity."

The line _Here feel we not the penalty of Adam?_ has given rise to much perplexity. The expounders of Shakspere do not believe he can mean that the uses of adversity are really sweet. But the duke sees that _the penalty_ of Adam is what makes the _woods more free from peril than the envious court;_ that this penalty is in fact the best blessing, for it _feelingly persuades_ man _what_ he is; and to know what we are, to have no false judgments of ourselves, he considers so sweet, that to be thus taught, the _churlish chiding of the winter's wind_ is well endured.

Now let us turn to _Lear_. We find in him an old man with a large heart, hungry for love, and yet not knowing what love is; an old man as ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; with a temper so unsubdued, and therefore so unkingly, that he storms because his dinner is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child, in short, in everything but his grey hairs and wrinkled face, but his failing, instead of growing, strength. If a life end so, let the success of that life be otherwise what it may, it is a wretched and unworthy end. But let _Lear_ be blown by the winds and beaten by the rains of heaven, till he pities "poor naked wretches;" till he feels that he has "ta'en too little care of" such; till pomp no longer conceals from him what "a poor, bare, forked animal" he is; and the old king has risen higher in the real social scale--the scale of that country to which he is bound--far higher than he stood while he still held his kingdom undivided to his thankless daughters. Then let him learn at last that "love is the only good in the world;" let him find his _Cordelia_, and plot with her how they will in their dungeon _singing like birds i' the cage_, and, dwelling in the secret place of peace, look abroad on the world like _G.o.d's spies_; and then let the generous great old heart swell till it breaks at last--not with rage and hate and vengeance, but with love; and all is well: it is time the man should go to overtake his daughter; henceforth to dwell with her in the home of the true, the eternal, the unchangeable. All his suffering came from his own fault; but from the suffering has sprung another crop, not of evil but of good; the seeds of which had lain unfruitful in the soil, but were brought within the blessed influences of the air of heaven by the sharp tortures of the ploughshare of ill.

THE ELDER HAMLET.

[Footnote: 1875]

'Tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart.

The ghost in "Hamlet" is as faithfully treated as any character in the play. Next to Hamlet himself, he is to me the most interesting person of the drama. The rumour of his appearance is wrapped in the larger rumour of war. Loud preparations for uncertain attack fill the ears of "the subject of the land." The state is troubled. The new king has hardly compa.s.sed his election before his marriage with his brother's widow swathes the court in the dust-cloud of shame, which the merriment of its forced revelry can do little to dispel. A feeling is in the moral air to which the words of Francisco, the only words of significance he utters, give the key: "'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart." Into the frosty air, the pallid moonlight, the drunken shouts of Claudius and his court, the bellowing of the cannon from the rampart for the enlargement of the insane clamour that it may beat the drum of its own disgrace at the portals of heaven, glides the silent prisoner of h.e.l.l, no longer a king of the day walking about his halls, "the observed of all observers," but a thrall of the night, wandering between the bell and the c.o.c.k, like a jailer on each side of him. A poet tells the tale of the king who lost his garments and ceased to be a king: here is the king who has lost his body, and in the eyes of his court has ceased to be a man. Is the cold of the earth's night pleasant to him after the purging fire? What crimes had the honest ghost committed in his days of nature?

He calls them foul crimes! Could such be his? Only who can tell how a ghost, with his doubled experience, may think of this thing or that? The ghost and the fire may between them distinctly recognize that as a foul crime which the man and the court regarded as a weakness at worst, and indeed in a king laudable.

Alas, poor ghost! Around the house he flits, shifting and shadowy, over the ground he once paced in ringing armour--armed still, but his very armour a shadow! It cannot keep out the arrow of the c.o.c.k's cry, and the heart that pierces is no shadow. Where now is the loaded axe with which, in angry dispute, he smote the ice at his feet that cracked to the blow?

Where is the arm that heaved the axe? Wasting in the marble maw of the sepulchre, and the arm he carries now--I know not what it can do, but it cannot slay his murderer. For that he seeks his son's. Doubtless his new ethereal form has its capacities and privileges. It can shift its garb at will; can appear in mail or night-gown, unaided of armourer or tailor; can pa.s.s through Hades-gates or chamber-door with equal ease; can work in the ground like mole or pioneer, and let its voice be heard from the cellarage. But there is one to whom it cannot appear, one whom the ghost can see, but to whom he cannot show himself. She has built a doorless, windowless wall between them, and sees the husband of her youth no more. Outside her heart--that is the night in which he wanders, while the palace-windows are flaring, and the low wind throbs to the wa.s.sail shouts: within, his murderer sits by the wife of his bosom, and in the orchard the spilt poison is yet gnawing at the roots of the daisies.

Twice has the ghost grown out of the night upon the eyes of the sentinels. With solemn march, slow and stately, three times each night, has he walked by them; they, jellied with fear, have uttered no challenge. They seek Horatio, who the third night speaks to him as a scholar can. To the first challenge he makes no answer, but stalks away; to the second,

It lifted up its head, and did address Itself to motion, like as it would speak;

but the gaoler c.o.c.k calls him, and the kingly shape

started like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons;

and then

shrunk in haste away, And vanished from our sight.

Ah, that summons! at which majesty welks and shrivels, the king and soldier starts and cowers, and, armour and all, withers from the air!

But why has he not spoken before? why not now ere the c.o.c.k could claim him? He cannot trust the men. His court has forsaken his memory--crowds with as eager discontent about the mildewed ear as ever about his wholesome brother, and how should he trust mere sentinels? There is but one who will heed his tale. A word to any other would but defeat his intent. Out of the mult.i.tude of courtiers and subjects, in all the land of Denmark, there is but one whom he can trust--his student-son. Him he has not yet found--the condition of a ghost involving strange difficulties.

Or did the horror of the men at the sight of him wound and repel him?

Does the sense of regal dignity, not yet exhausted for all the fasting in fires, unite with that of grievous humiliation to make him shun their speech?

But Horatio--why does the ghost not answer him ere the time of the c.o.c.k is come? Does he fold the cloak of indignation around him because his son's friend has addressed him as an intruder on the night, an usurper of the form that is his own? The companions of the speaker take note that he is offended and stalks away.

Much has the kingly ghost to endure in his attempt to re-open relations with the world he has left: when he has overcome his wrath and returns, that moment Horatio again insults him, calling him an illusion. But this time he will bear it, and opens his mouth to speak. It is too late; the c.o.c.k is awake, and he must go. Then alas for the buried majesty of Denmark! with upheaved halberts they strike at the shadow, and would stop it if they might--usage so grossly unfitting that they are instantly ashamed of it themselves, recognizing the offence in the majesty of the offended. But he is already gone. The proud, angry king has found himself but a thing of nothing to his body-guard--for he has lost the body which was their guard. Still, not even yet has he learned how little it lies in the power of an honest ghost to gain credit for himself or his tale! His very privileges are against him.

All this time his son is consuming his heart in the knowledge of a mother capable of so soon and so utterly forgetting such a husband, and in pity and sorrow for the dead father who has had such a wife. He is thirty years of age, an obedient, honourable son--a man of thought, of faith, of aspiration. Him now the ghost seeks, his heart burning like a coal with the sense of unendurable wrong. He is seeking the one drop that can fall cooling on that heart--the sympathy, the answering rage and grief of his boy. But when at length he finds him, the generous, loving father has to see that son tremble like an aspen-leaf in his doubtful presence. He has exposed himself to the shame of eyes and the indignities of dullness, that he may pour the pent torrent of his wrongs into his ears, but his disfranchis.e.m.e.nt from the flesh tells against him even with his son: the young Hamlet is doubtful of the ident.i.ty of the apparition with his father. After all the burning words of the phantom, the spirit he has seen may yet be a devil; the devil has power to a.s.sume a pleasing shape, and is perhaps taking advantage of his melancholy to d.a.m.n him.

Armed in the complete steel of a suit well known to the eyes of the sentinels, visionary none the less, with useless truncheon in hand, resuming the memory of old martial habits, but with quiet countenance, more in sorrow than in anger, troubled--not now with the thought of the h.e.l.l-day to which he must sleepless return, but with that unceasing ache at the heart, which ever, as often as he is released into the cooling air of the upper world, draws him back to the region of his wrongs--where having fallen asleep in his orchard, in sacred security and old custom, suddenly, by cruel a.s.sault, he was flung into Hades, where horror upon horror awaited him--worst horror of all, the knowledge of his wife!--armed he comes, in shadowy armour but how real sorrow!

Still it is not pity he seeks from his son: he needs it not--he can endure. There is no weakness in the ghost. It is but to the imperfect human sense that he is shadowy. To himself he knows his doom his deliverance; that the h.e.l.l in which he finds himself shall endure but until it has burnt up the h.e.l.l he has found within him--until the evil he was and is capable of shall have dropped from him into the lake of fire; he nerves himself to bear. And the cry of revenge that comes from the sorrowful lips is the cry of a king and a Dane rather than of a wronged man. It is for public justice and not individual vengeance he calls. He cannot endure that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch for luxury and d.a.m.ned incest. To stay this he would bring the murderer to justice. There is a worse wrong, for which he seeks no revenge: it involves his wife; and there comes in love, and love knows no amends but amendment, seeks only the repentance tenfold more needful to the wronger than the wronged. It is not alone the father's care for the human nature of his son that warns him to take no measures against his mother; it is the husband's tenderness also for her who once lay in his bosom. The murdered brother, the dethroned king, the dishonoured husband, the tormented sinner, is yet a gentle ghost. Has suffering already begun to make him, like Prometheus, wise?

But to measure the gentleness, the forgiveness, the tenderness of the ghost, we must well understand his wrongs. The murder is plain; but there is that which went before and is worse, yet is not so plain to every eye that reads the story. There is that without which the murder had never been, and which, therefore, is a cause of all the wrong. For listen to what the ghost reveals when at length he has withdrawn his son that he may speak with him alone, and Hamlet has forestalled the disclosure of the murderer:

"Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, (O wicked wit and gifts that have the power So to seduce!) won to his shameful l.u.s.t The will of my most seeming virtuous queen: Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there!

From me, whose love was of that dignity That it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage, and to decline Upon a wretch, whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine!

But virtue--as it never will be moved Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So l.u.s.t, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage."

Reading this pa.s.sage, can any one doubt that the ghost charges his late wife with adultery, as the root of all his woes? It is true that, obedient to the ghost's injunctions, as well as his own filial instincts, Hamlet accuses his mother of no more than was patent to all the world; but unless we suppose the ghost misinformed or mistaken, we must accept this charge. And had Gertrude not yielded to the witchcraft of Claudius' wit, Claudius would never have murdered Hamlet. Through her his life was dishonoured, and his death violent and premature: unhuzled, disappointed, unaneled, he woke to the air--not of his orchard-blossoms, but of a prison-house, the lightest word of whose terrors would freeze the blood of the listener. What few men can say, he could--that his love to his wife had kept even step with the vow he made to her in marriage; and his son says of him--

"so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly;"

and this was her return! Yet is it thus he charges his son concerning her:

"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 p.r.i.c.k and sting her."

And may we not suppose it to be for her sake in part that the ghost insists, with fourfold repet.i.tion, upon a sword-sworn oath to silence from Horatio and Marcellus?

Only once again does he show himself--not now in armour upon the walls, but in his gown and in his wife's closet.

Ever since his first appearance, that is, all the time filling the interval between the first and second acts, we may presume him to have haunted the palace unseen, waiting what his son would do. But the task has been more difficult than either had supposed. The amba.s.sadors have gone to Norway and returned; but Hamlet has done nothing. Probably he has had no opportunity; certainly he has had no clear vision of duty.

But now all through the second and third acts, together occupying, it must be remembered, only one day, something seems imminent. The play has been acted, and Hamlet has gained some a.s.surance, yet the one chance presented of killing the king--at his prayers--he has refused. He is now in his mother's closet, whose eyes he has turned into her very soul.

There, and then, the ghost once more appears--come, he says, to whet his son's almost blunted purpose. But, as I have said, he does not know all the disadvantages of one who, having forsaken the world, has yet business therein to which he would persuade; he does not know how hard it is for a man to give credence to a ghost; how thoroughly he is justified in delay, and the demand for more perfect proof. He does not know what good reasons his son has had for uncertainty, or how much natural and righteous doubt has had to do with what he takes for the blunting of his purpose. Neither does he know how much more tender his son's conscience is than his own, or how necessary it is to him to be sure before he acts. As little perhaps does he understand how hateful to Hamlet is the task laid upon him--the killing of one wretched villain in the midst of a corrupt and contemptible court, one of a world of whose women his mother may be the type!

Whatever the main object of the ghost's appearance, he has spoken but a few words concerning the matter between him and Hamlet, when he turns abruptly from it to plead with his son for his wife. The ghost sees and mistakes the terror of her looks; imagines that, either from some feeling of his presence, or from the power of Hamlet's words, her conscience is thoroughly roused, and that her vision, her conception of the facts, is now more than she can bear. She and her fighting soul are at odds. She is a kingdom divided against itself. He fears the consequences. He would not have her go mad. He would not have her die yet. Even while ready to start at the summons of that h.e.l.l to which she has sold him, he forgets his vengeance on her seducer in his desire to comfort her. He dares not, if he could, manifest himself to her: what word of consolation could she hear from his lips? Is not the thought of him her one despair? He turns to his son for help: he cannot console his wife; his son must take his place. Alas! even now he thinks better of her than she deserves; for it is only the fancy of her son's madness that is terrifying her: he gazes on the apparition of which she sees nothing, and from his looks she antic.i.p.ates an ungovernable outbreak.

"But look; amazement on thy mother sits!

Oh; step between her and her fighting soul Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.

Speak to her, Hamlet."

The call to his son to soothe his wicked mother is the ghost's last utterance. For a few moments, sadly regardful of the two, he stands--while his son seeks in vain to reveal to his mother the presence of his father--a few moments of piteous action, all but ruining the remnant of his son's sorely-hara.s.sed self-possession--his whole concern his wife's distress, and neither his own doom nor his son's duty; then, as if lost in despair at the impa.s.sable gulf betwixt them, revealed by her utter incapacity for even the imagination of his proximity, he turns away, and steals out at the portal. Or perhaps he has heard the black c.o.c.k crow, and is wanted beneath: his turn has come.

Will the fires ever cleanse _her_? Will his love ever lift him above the pain of its loss? Will eternity ever be bliss, ever be endurable to poor _King Hamlet?_

Alas! even the memory of the poor ghost is insulted. Night after night on the stage his effigy appears--cadaverous, sepulchral--no longer as Shakspere must have represented him, aerial, shadowy, gracious, the thin corporeal husk of an eternal--shall I say ineffaceable?--sorrow! It is no hollow monotone that can rightly upbear such words as his, but a sound mingled of distance and wind in the pine-tops, of agony and love, of horror and hope and loss and judgment--a voice of endless and sweetest inflection, yet with a shuddering echo in it as from the caves of memory, on whose walls, are written the eternal blazon that must not be to ears of flesh and blood. The spirit that can a.s.sume form at will must surely be able to bend that form to completest and most delicate expression, and the part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse--whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance of its lively will!