"That noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,"
because she cannot understand his unflattering talk that appears to
be disclaiming any regard for her and any desire to marry her. In all
those sentences that make such a coarse rupture with love and soil
the previous sentiment of their intercourse, there is no trace of a
distracted mind. How could we expect this maid to be prepared to
entertain such monstrous irony? It was as much Shakspeare's intention
to have him misunderstood as to represent him so occupied by the
sweeping scepticism that follows the disclosure of villainy. This irony
of the most sombre kind, the mental mood that corresponds to such a
harsh awakening, was not customary with Hamlet, who was by nature
mirthful before this murder happened.
And notice how this ironical tone is kept up by him all through
Ophelia's misconception, into which she falls because Hamlet's mood is
too overpowering, and she thinks he has a wrecked brain from which she
can rescue nothing to enable her to claim the salvage of loving him.
When he meets her after many days of unaccountable neglect, she returns
the few remembrances which were messengers of the happier hours of his
affection, but he casts discredit upon these sacred tokens. He never
meant them, in fact he never gave her any thing. But she says, "Yes,"
"And with them words of so sweet breath compos'd,
As made the things more rich."
Has the bloom been rubbed from them, and their perfume lost? Then, says
the self-respecting maid, tearing the presents by bleeding roots out of
the heart where they had lodged to fructify, take them again,
"For to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor, when givers prove unkind."
"I did love you once," he says. "Indeed, my lord, you made me believe
so." Hamlet is enraged at his own love, and appears to have discarded
it, for that too may smile and be a villain, or hers may. "You should
not have believed me: for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock, but
we shall relish of it." That is to say, if I had felt true love grafted
on my stem I should have received and imparted its flavor of sincerity.
But nothing is sincere: "I loved you not."
Hamlet's observation of human nature had furnished him with elements
which only needed provocation to develop into this uncompromising
irony. His mother, married to that satyr of an uncle,
"Or ere those shoes were old,
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,"
might well cast a slur upon the sex in his opinion, and prompt the
text which cynics use, "Frailty, thy name is woman,"--all but Ophelia:
it does not include her until all life's illusions vanished with the
ghost. Then she would do well not to walk in the sun, and would be
safest in a nunnery.
Previous to that, he had dispatched a missive to her, which is commonly
supposed to have been written on purpose to foster the notion that
he was mad. But its tone does not seem to me to have been rightly
interpreted. It begins in the style of Pistol: "To the celestial, and
my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia." Then comes a verse fit
for a valentine,--
"Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love."
So far the mocking spirit of his irony does not fail him. But the mood
changes, for this was written just after the scene in Ophelia's chamber
when he seemed to bid her an eternal farewell. Remembering this, he
breaks the tone and adds, "O dear Ophelia! I am ill at these numbers: I
have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, oh! most
best, believe it." So with impetuous emphasis he confessed afterward
upon Ophelia's grave. Nothing could more precisely convey to us his
mental condition than this mixture of moods.
In the churchyard scene, we observe that Hamlet recurs unconsciously
to his ordinary mental disposition, because he is alone there with
Horatio, whose grave and silent friendship is congenial. It is the foil
to Hamlet's restless speculation; it calls a truce to the civil war
between his temper and his purpose. He is pacified in the society of
Horatio, who gives him a chance to recur to his native mental habit. As
he naively pours out his thoughts, how little does Horatio answer! as
little as the ground beneath their feet, less laconic than the lawyer's
skull. He is a continent upon which Hamlet finds that he can securely
walk, the only domain in Denmark that is not honeycombed with pitfalls.
Turning toward Horatio's loyal affection, he feels a response that is
articulated without words. As little need the forest reply to her lover
save in dumb show and in obscure reflex of feeling.
The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air disarms and
dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we see that Hamlet was naturally
more inclined to that use of satire which indicates an ideal far
lifted above the methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense
into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the lawyer, and we
acknowledge the satirical tone of an exalted mind. And this lends to
that scene a feeling that in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes
the usual tone which always advertised him to his friends. To them his
long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken by so few sallies of his
healthy satire, was additional confirmation of his madness because it
was so unusual with him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind;
they were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that Polonius
hurried to show his insapiency by attributing the craze to love for his
daughter. 'Tis very likely, they all thought, for they could refer to
no other probable cause for it.
It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony that Shakspeare has
expressed the effect of an apparition, and of the disenchanting news it
brought, upon a mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind
tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of madness.
Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow;
but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till
health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of
his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown
by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They
preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us
worship them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of madness and
lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the
complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,--that is,
the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband
does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with
this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on
which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only
an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction!
He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With
the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth
being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent
well,--he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to
fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a
dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale
fish.
If we return to a period in the play which follows closely upon the
scene of the taking of the oath, Ophelia herself will discover for us
the turning mood in Hamlet's character. The time and action of the
piece allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath-taking to
visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that bloodless and freezing
visitation to see life heaving in a dear bosom and reddening in lips
which he had love's liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had
worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes down from the hills
to choke the running of sweet streams, deface with stains of mud all
natural beauties, and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the
meadows spangled with forget-me-nots. His love for Ophelia was the
most mastering impulse of his life: it stretched like a broad, rich
domain, down to which he came from the shadowy places of his private
thought to fling himself in the unchecked sunshine, and revel in the
limpid bath of feeling. How often, in hours which only over-curious
brooding upon the problems of life had hitherto disquieted, had he gone
to let her smile strip off the shadow of his thought, and expose him to
untroubled nature! The moisture of her eyes refreshed his questioning;
her phrases answered it beyond philosophy; a maidenly submission of her
hand renewed his confidence; an unspoken sympathy of her reserve, that
flowed into the slight hints and permissions of her body, nominated him
as lover and disfranchised him as thinker; and a sun-shower seemed to
pelt through him to drift his vapors off. But this open gladness has
disappeared underneath the avalanche of murder which a ghostly hand
had loosened. He ventures down to the place where he remembers that it
used to expect him; but we know that it has disappeared. His air and
behavior announce it to us. The catastrophe seems to have swept even
over his person, to dishevel the apparel upon that "mould of form."
In this ruin of his life Ophelia is the first one buried; for she was
always more resident in his soul than maintained within a palace, and
his soul is no longer habitable.
Polonius has just been giving those scandalous instructions to his pimp
to waylay the Danes in Paris, and, by insinuations of ill-conduct in
Laertes, worm out of them possible admissions of its truth. He wants
to know how his son is spending money in the gay capital, how many
times he gamed, was overtaken in drink, or visited "a house of sale."
The pimp is to draw on his fellow-countrymen by pretending that Laertes
is given to all these things: he knows the man; 'tis the common talk
about him at home; you cannot surprise him by any thing you say. Says
the old manœuvrer:
"See you now;
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses, and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out."
No wonder that Hamlet in the churchyard, kicking the pate of a
politician, called it something "that would circumvent God." The
state-craft of old Polonius has lived so long without a change that its
garments are dropping from its limbs. Now see what an indecent forked
radish it is. But the scene is eminently in its place, and has nothing
incongruous with what transpires before or after; for the incident is
cunningly contrived to prepare us to find him applying his principle of
the windlass and indirect purchase to the relation of Hamlet with his
daughter; and it breeds in us a contempt for the notion that the Prince
has been made mad by love.
Ophelia enters to her father:
"Oh, my lord, my lord! I have been so affrighted!"
Then she describes Lord Hamlet entering with garments all disordered,
"And with a look so piteous in purport,
As if he had been loosed out of hell,
To speak of horrors....
He took me by the wrist, and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face,
As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;
At last,--a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,--
He rais'd a sigh so piteous and profound,
That it did seem to shatter all his bulk,
And end his being. That done, he lets me go:
And, with his head over his shoulder turn'd,
He seem'd to find his way without his eyes;
For out of doors he went without their help,
And, to the last, bended their light on me."
Polonius decides that it is the very ecstasy of love. Yes, it is, but
ecstasy that has made an assignation with despair. The two feelings
meet at the rendezvous of Ophelia's description, where they display to
us the yearning scrutiny that a man throws into the eyes of an expiring
love: it is too passionately dear to be surrendered into the inane; it
is too selfishly personal to be consistent with his future purpose. For
he had married a bride at midnight who is still expecting him. It is
the consummation of one murder by another. For such a bridal as that,
to leave her cheeks on which the color comes and goes between her love
and his renunciation, "like heralds 'twixt two dreadful battles set,"
seems to shatter and end his being. But let him fall to such perusal of
her face as he may, he sees the complexion of the ghost through each
warm feature; and its pallor stands even there to wave him apart to an
interview in which all seeming becomes debatable, for rascally things
may smile. He shades his brow, and his eyes are two magnets which he
detaches from her heart, as he surrenders his last confidence in a
stale and unprofitable world.
The irony reaches its most powerful exercise in the second scene of the
third act, where Hamlet avails himself of the arrival of play-actors
to test the King with his mouse-trap of an interlude. The Athenian
mechanics played Pyramus and Thisbe with the simple intention of
contributing their duty and homage to the nuptials. We see the humor
of its juxtaposition with courtly scenes and weddings. But Hamlet,
in his interlude, pretends amusement and mimics a murder to conceal
his knowledge of the real one. "No, no, they do but jest, poison in
jest; no offence in the world." His light talk with Ophelia is nothing
but the audacity of excitement and expectation. His baffling of
Guildenstern with the pipe; his making Polonius see a camel, a weasel,
and a whale in a cloud,--covers the dreadful necessity which drives
him, in the witching time of night, to that upbraiding of a mother, and
that second meeting with a dead father, which will make men's breath
bate and their veins creep while English is spoken in this world.
What other mood than Irony could a soul with such a secret for its
guest spread for entertainment? Too strongly built and level to be
cracked with the earthquake of madness; too awfully overclouded
to sparkle with imaginings of wit; too daunted and saddened with
the thought of a dear father in purgatorial flames to break into
the geniality of Humor,--all his mirth lost of late, there is no
resource, no method of relief to the mind that is strained to live
with dissemblers and swear vengeance to a ghost, but to dissemble too
with an irony as ruthless and sweeping as the crime. He saves his wits
which might otherwise justify suspicion and go all distraught, by
unconsciously assuming that love, marriage, chastity, all honorable
things, and friendship too, are crazes, and he that banters them alone
is sane.
But when he knows that the grave, near which he stood and satirized
the careers which men pursue, was another piece of irony, since Nature
by keeping Ophelia alive and beautiful really meant death by her, it
destroys his own tendency to be ironical, and he breaks forth with an
intense sincerity; then we take the point of his previous behavior.
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum."
And as his soul was thus ample in its love, so was it in all serious
and ennobling things,--too much so to grow deranged, enough so to
create the concealment and defence of all his innuendo.
The tone recurs when Osrick is introduced, and makes a speech full
of pompous platitudes about Laertes,--"an absolute gentleman, full
of most excellent differences, the card or calendar of gentry," and
so on. Hamlet mimics the style; and you would think he was just such
another natty phrase-monger as Osrick, whose macaronic manner he
assumes to indicate his aversion from it. "Sir, his definement suffers
no perdition in you; though, I know, to divide him inventorially would
dizzy the arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of
his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to be a
soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and rareness,
as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his mirror; and who
else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more."
I wonder that the psychologists have not greedily picked up this
obscure and fantastic passage as a specimen of his craft in feigning.
But Osrick belonged to the prosaic sort of minds which took up so
readily with the theory of Hamlet's madness; all of them incapable
of irony, therefore not competent to fly into his meaning; limited,
like the dodo and other wingless birds, to running along the plain
appearance. "Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him," says Osrick.
So Hamlet could sport, who went towards his death with a presentiment
which his soul was great enough to put aside, and also give him breath
to say how great it was: "We defy augury: there is a special providence
in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be
not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all." No crotchet of real or assumed madness could lurk in
the repose of such a man.