The Three Heron's Feathers Part 23

In 'Hamlet,' i, 2, 67, the King asks Hamlet: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" and he ironically replies: "Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun." Here again "sun" means "sunshine," and Hamlet, choosing to understand the King literally, and referring to the fact that clouds are dissipated by a genial sun, sneeringly protests that he is too much in the sunshine of royalty to have clouds hanging about him. Referring to a different effect of the sun's warmth, Prince John speaks of "The man that sits within a monarch's heart And ripens in the sunshine of his favor"; '2 Henry IV,' iv, 2, 12. There are other similar uses of the word "sun," which need not now be cited.

The last reference to Ophelia's supposed relation to the King occurs when Polonius comes to announce the presence of the players:

"_Ham_. 'O Jephthah, judge of Israel,' what a treasure hadst thou!

"_Pol_. What treasure had he, my lord?

"_Ham_. Why 'One fair daughter, and no more, the which he loved pa.s.sing well.'

"_Pol_. Still on my daughter [_aside_].

"_Ham_. Am I not i' the right, old Jephthah?

"_Pol_. If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I have a daughter that I love pa.s.sing well.

"_Ham_. Nay, that follows not.

"_Pol_. What follows then, my lord?

"_Ham_. Why, 'As by lot, G.o.d wot.'"

Here Hamlet again mystifies Polonius about his daughter, quoting from an old English ballad. Jephthah is pilloried in history as the man who sacrificed his daughter in payment for his worldly success. Shakespeare also refers to him in '3 Henry VI,' v, 1, 91: "To keep that oath were more impiety than Jephthah's when he sacrificed his daughter." Hamlet dubs Polonius "Jephthah," because he believes that he has paid for political preferment by yielding his daughter to the King. And when Polonius says that, if he is to be called Jephthah, he admits that like Jephthah he loves his daughter, Hamlet replies in characteristic vein, "Nay, that follows not"; meaning that it follows instead that like Jephthah he has sacrificed her. But when Polonius presses him to say what does follow, he conceals his real meaning, as his custom is, and diverts the old man's mind by answering the line from the ballad. As was the case with regard to Ophelia, Hamlet is reluctant to make the open charge against her father.

Thus in every instance in which Hamlet comes in contact with Ophelia, or refers to her, his actions and his words consistently point to the fact that he renounces her because he believes her to have thrust him aside while engaging in an intrigue with the King. And the fact that from this point of view there is a connected story of their relations told by the several interviews above discussed, that Hamlet's conduct and language in them all are adequately explained, and that a single belief of his accounts for each of them, is strong confirmation of the theory's correctness. It is in harmony with the general scheme of the drama also, all of whose important movements hinge on "purposes mistook"; and it furnishes Hamlet with an adequate motive for his treatment of Ophelia, and removes from him the stigma of mere brutishness or insanity. Coleridge well says that there must have been "some profound heart truth" under the story, and the theory herein advanced seems to disclose it. _David A. McKnight_.

Washington, D. C., February 26, 1898.

CLEWS TO EMERSON'S MYSTIC VERSE.

(Third Paper.)

"When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room."--_Touchstone_.

The phantasmal lords of life of the poem 'Experience,' which we considered at the close of the last paper, were presumably suggested to Emerson by the following lines from Tennyson's 'Mystic,' published in 1830 (Emerson imported these early volumets of young Tennyson, and never tired of praising them to his friends):--

"Always there stood before him, night and day, Of wayward vary-colored circ.u.mstance The imperishable presences serene, Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound, Dim shadows but unwaning presences Four-faced to four corners of the sky."

The "silent congregated hours," "daughters of time, divinely tall,"

with "severe and youthful brows," in this same poem of Tennyson gave Emerson his "daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days," congregated in procession. Tennyson's mystic, who hears "time flowing in the middle of the night" recalls Emerson's 'Two Rivers,' in which the living All, the Infinite Soul, is figured as a stream flowing through eternity:--

"I hear the spending of the stream, Through years, through men, through nature fleet, Through love and thought, through power and dream."

At the close of the poem 'Wealth' there is a bit of scientific nature-ethics which is a little obscure. The greater part of the poem is a series of graphic pictures, detailing the process of world-development through the geologic ages down to the advent of man.

Suddenly, at the end,--just as at the end of the prose essay on the same subject,--he remembers his manners and makes his bow to the august Soul, kindles a light in the Geissler tube of nature, sets it aglow interiorly with spiritual law:--

"But, though light-headed man forget, Remembering Matter pays her debt: Still, through her motes and ma.s.ses, draw Electric thrills and ties of Law, Which bind the strength of Nature wild To the conscience of a child."

The logical link connecting this part with the rest has dropped out in the poem, but is clear enough in the essay. The lines mean simply this: that, though man may forget to obey the laws of the universe, Nature never forgets her debt of obedience; she bites and stings the transgressor and caresses and soothes him who obeys. In her own submission to law she has that artlessness and quasi-moral sense that affines her to the moral nature of a child. The "awful victors" and "Eternal Rights" of 'Voluntaries' are only "remembering Matter" in another mask: with all their innocent obedience they are themselves terrible executors:--

"They reach no term, they never sleep, In equal strength through s.p.a.ce abide; Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep, The strong they slay, the swift outstride."

In the following high pantheistic strain the seer chants the old rune that G.o.d is all:--

"The living Heaven thy prayers respect, House at once and architect, Quarrying man's rejected hours, Builds therewith eternal towers; Sole and self-commanded works, Fears not undermining days, Grows by decays, And, by the famous might that lurks In reaction and recoil, Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil; Forging, through swart arms of Offence, The silver seat of Innocence."

--'Spiritual Laws.'

When the Living Universe builds a house, it builds it out of its own soul substance; while man sleeps and loiters, the Unconscious ceaselessly toils. In the phrase "grows by decays," Emerson embodies, I believe, the law of the conservation of energy. The magazine of divine power is exhaustless; does energy sink out of sight here, it is only to reappear yonder; the tree decays, but out of its fertilizing substance new plants may spring up; the coal under the steam boiler of the locomotive is consumed, but the swart goblin has lost no whit of his might: he just slips darkling up into the steam, makes the driving-rods his swift-shuttling arms, and, grasping with his steel fingers the felloes of the wheel, whirls you half a thousand miles over the green bulge of the earth ere set of sun, The mystic Power grows by decays; and also, by "the famous might that lurks in reaction and recoil,"

reconciles apparent antinomies and opposites, and is the agent that visits evil upon the head of the evil doer and mercy upon the merciful.

If a heavy body be rolled up an inclined plane, it acquires potential and kinetic energy just equal to the force expended in getting it there, and in reaction develops such a famous might that, if ma.s.sive enough, it will knock you down if you stand in its way. If you lift the big pendulum of the clock in the corner, you also confer latent, or reactionary, energy upon it. Only it is of course hyperbolical for the poet to say that reaction is potent enough to actually freeze flame and make ice boil your kettle. That is only one of Emerson's rhetorical Chinese crackers, his startling thaumaturgic way of ill.u.s.trating his thesis.

The key-thought of the essay 'Spiritual Laws,' to which the occult lines we are considering were prefixed, is, Be n.o.ble; for, if you are not, your face and life will, by the law of reaction and return, publish your lapse. Punishment and reward are fruits that ripen unsuspected in the deeds of men.

The pertinency and application of many of Emerson's t.i.tles are not at once apparent.

In 'Merops' the bard affirms that in his high philosophical soarings he cares not whether he can at once ticket his intuitions and perceptions with names or not. Merops was changed into an eagle, says Ovid, and placed among the constellations,--hence, I suppose, is selected by Emerson as a good type of the kind of soaring thinker he is describing.

That he also has in mind that Merops was the putative father of Phaethon is shown perhaps by the allusion (in the last stanza) to Phaethon's mishap:--

"s.p.a.ce grants beyond his fated road No inch to the G.o.d of day, And copious language still bestowed One word, no more, to say."

'Alphonso of Castile' is a dramatic monologue containing a whimsical suggestion for compounding a Man out of ordinary weak-timbered manikins by killing nine in ten of them and "stuffing nine brains in one hat."

It is put into the mouth of Alphonso, King of Castile, born in 1221, called _El Sabio_, "The Wise." He was a man who suffered much in his life. He wrote a famous code of laws, and first made the Castilian a national language by causing the Bible to be translated into it.

Emerson chooses him as the vehicle of his own whimsey about the condensed homunculus chiefly on account of one famous sentence attributed to him: "Had I been present at the creation, I could have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe."

Emerson, in his rhymed soliloquy, put into Alphonso's mouth, sarcastically twits Nature with her depleted stocks, her run-out strains of lemons, figs, roses, and men. The remedy proposed in the case of man, and outlined above, has the true Emerson-Swift bouquet, is colored and veined with a right Shakespearian scorn of the mob.

'Mithridates' is a monologue put into the mouth of Mithridates the Great, King of Pontus, who is said to have discovered an antidote for poisons which made him poison-proof against his many enemies:--

"I cannot spare water or wine, Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose; From the earth-poles to the line, All between that works or grows, Everything is kin of mine.

Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharids to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and alt.i.tudes."

As late as 1787 "mithridate" was the name for an antidote against poison included in the London pharmacop[oe]ia. In Jonson's 'Every Man in his Humour,' Kitely, thinking he is poisoned, calls for mithridate and oil. It was composed of many ingredients and given in the form of electuaries. In our modern pharmacopoeias we have plenty of antidotes against virulent poisons; _e. g_., atropine for the deadly amanita mushroom. And counter-poisons are often used, as the tincture of foxglove for aconite, atropine for morphia, or morphia for belladonna.

According to the tradition, Mithridates gradually inured his system to counter-poisons, and became poison-proof. At any rate, Emerson uses him for his metaphor, which, in untropical speech, is this: "lam tired of the nambypamby and goody-goody; give me things strong and rank; give me evil for a change and a spur.

"Too long shut in strait and few, Thinly dieted on dew, I will use the world, and sift it, To a thousand humors shift it, As you spin a cherry.

O doleful ghosts and goblins merry!

O all you virtues, methods, mights, Means, appliances, delights, Reputed wrongs and braggart rights, Smug routine, and things allowed, Minorities, things under cloud!

Hither! take me, use me, fill me, Vein and artery, though ye kill me!"

In brief, "I have run the gauntlet of experience, sounded all the depths of pa.s.sion, joy, woe, evil. I am dipped in Styx, more invulnerable than Siegfried, and strong now to use the world and be used by it." The mood of the poem is the wild longing that sometimes comes over the good man to break loose and have his fling, come what may, cry, _Vive la bagatelle!_ or run amuck and tilt at all he meets.

It is needless to say that the staid Emerson never carried this mood farther than to smoke a cigar now and then, or take an Adirondack outing. His contemporary, the untrammelled Whitman, could both preach and practise (within the bounds of reason) the Mithridatic doctrine; and he was a more many-sided and symmetrical man in consequence.

The last two lines of 'Mithridates,' as printed from the autograph copy, were,--