CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR 2807.D26 Hamjet.Madame Roland. Lectures.By C.K. D 3 1924 013 137 595 The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013137595 HAMLET. MADAME ROLAND. LECTURES O. KI. IDJL^IS. ST. PAUL: THE PIONBBB PRESS CO. 1882. fi 161'i HAMLET. The English-speaking world long ago committed itself to the persuasion that humanity has its com- pletest expounder in that marvellous man, who, like a magician working in the night, built in silence a great palace of thought, glorious with its pin- nacles, its far-flashing lights, its halls of harmony, its festal rooms, its imperial arches; dreadftil in its dungeons, its chambers of torture and its peni- tential cells — peopled it with undying occupants, and then departed, leaving less trace of himself, except as it is found in that eternal architecture, than a dream upon the memories of dawn. But we know him in his works as we know the great Creator. The spacious firmament which he has spread showeth his handy- work. He dealt with good and evil. Man stands in that intellectual heritage in all his lordly dominance, and creeping things writhe through the multitude which he has made. All that he did is ministerial to man. His cloud-capped towers of imagination, the wildest efflorescence of his fancy, the perspective of his humour, which dilates into such grotesque propor- tions the shapes that walk therein, are merely 4 HA ML E T. illustrativo of man us ho soeniod to the greatest of mon. This fad has received univci'Hal recognition, lie Is the ahnoner of quotation, giving out his lar*- gess IVoin a stort* which grows wlien Cod on, and which increase ol' appetite does not waste. Wher- ovcM- man considers liiniHoir, ho is Ihore. To find the othci- poets, wo must ^o whcini they havo been. To commune with Danto wo pasH through the por- tals ol" eternal sorrow. IL' Hays to uh: Tor 1110 m vn uolla oittil doleute ; Per mo bo va noU' oloriio doloro ; Per rao m va tea lo porduto gento. We (ind Milton in the samo placo, or seated, blind, liko aj^onistic Samson, making HpoH. lor the Pliilistinos ainoufj;' the pillars oC the Ki)HtoraUon, and tugging to draw down tiu) roof (m all who sit beneath, LordH, liulii'H, oaptniiiR, ooiuselors and prieiiti. "Wc. Hcicik Burns in fields swoet with daiHJKH, or in tap-rooms odorous of John Hai-ioycorn. W(' find Shelley, a Hpirit onamorcd of a niyl.h, broodiiij^ over som(! pallid, H('.ul|)l,in-((d Ionian dn-ani, and making it live and throb and movu, Hpoak and love, with all a mortal's ardor. Wti c^an Hay that wo liavt) miiL tiiDHt! mon. 1 1 in foil to bo a solecism to say thai wo have iiutt Shakospoaro. I hi is \w\'- vasive; he playn i' \\w liltiiiiiiiit; he grows into our lives; he in a f^nido and (Viuiid, and ho is moro — HAMLET. 6 he is our double, who, instead of meeting us, goes along with us. We see our faces in his; his heart throbs in ours ; his thoughts of what we really are in the secretest parts of our being are our self- consciousness, and seem somehow to be our own written confessions, which we have lost, and which he has found and given back to us confidentially. He is the great circle which circumscribes human nature. Inscribed within that all-encircling peri- phery, are the minute and multitudinous lesser circles which comprehend the being of each person, containing whatever is personal and distinctive.^ He is the oracle of humanity — known to all men, but not as all men are known to him. It is, therefore, worthy the attention to consider his greatest creation — as much his greatest as he is greater than any other of the sons of men. And here let me say that any assertion of originality of discovery would be deceptive affectation. The utmost result now attainable is originality of expres- sion, and, I hope, a glimpse of details not hitherto fully observed. This favor can be accorded to the child even, who sees some mountain pinnacled in the heavens, dateless and changeless, which geologists have described, which poets have apostrophised, and filled from its fountains the urns of inspiration, which painters have depicted, and whose passes whole armies have tra'Versed for thousands of years. We stand in a presence (1 IfAMLMT. boJbi'o wliicli (JoolJui wiiH (Iwiirlwl; wliii'li ballUul till) iiiHiiii-od c.ril/uml IjiHtiiu'i of Oolnrldgo; whidli waw ndiiriiHli coiiiprdlunuUMl by rtMiliMlic llii/,li(i, who i(l(Miti(Uul i(, widi huinmiily llHt*!!' -nol only with huiniuiity at largo, but wilh oach individual ul' our The I'l'inco of I)(fiiiinu'l( has boon HfiidicMl by Hdvornl (M'ilidid j^ciKM'nlicniN. IIo luiH been oxaiu- iiuid in all bin inoodn, and ojiinionH (M)n('CM'ning him Hiill diiUtr, JuhI. aH opiiiiouH will dilU^r concitrning any living man. Tbtillaudd W(i road roHn v\\)im ilni world about, two luindrod ami t'ig'hiy yciarn ago. Il wan prc- ctidod by a Ib'Hl. dralV IVom Mlia,lct(M|»(Mir(i'H hand, and ]K)rhaj)H by an oldor play, nol. writion by him; bnl. th(!H(! woro heliacal, and W(*r(' Mucn no more altor the riHing ol' Mm Hiin whi(^h hIu!(Ih IIh rayN upon un. 'I'li(( play Ih loundctd n|)on a Iragody mon» har- rowing lliiin il)(t (talaHlroplut with which it (UkIh, and it opcnn with omi actor ovorwholmod by tlm dreadful Hctonc upon whi(^h the curtain Iuin JuMt (alien. The (iitlmr of Ilamh^t Iuih diitd by I'rat- ricidc — Htung to (h^ath, iih il wan given (tut, by a Herpent, while Hieeping in IiIh garden, 'I'bu brother haH poHMUHHcd hiniHolCor I Ik- throne by UHurpiition, and within two montliH aHer the death of the Uing ban married liiM widow. Hamlo#j thrown by thoHit ovont** iid.o the vortex ol' calamity, iindv himNoU' burrod from the hucc(!k- HAMLET. 7 sion by a cutpuree of the empire and the rule, and disgraced by the dexterity with which his mother posted to the marriage. Feeling all this, and suspecting in his prophetic soul the rottenness in the state of Denmark, his sorrow, indurated into melancholy, is attested by the inky cloak, and is denoted more truly by his avowal of that within which passeth show. It is while under the influ- ence of such a tragedy, one act of which is daily played before him in the shame of his mother, that such a mind is brought into communion with the spiritual world. His father's spirit walks armed abroad, and in the chill of a northern night, upon the platform at Elsinore, his voice, solemnized by the midnight sea sounding many fathoms beneath, reveals to Hamlet the guilt of the uncle, and ded- icates him to revenge. By that awful conference the varied purposes of the prince for his future are dislocated and shattered in a moment. All designs are wiped away from the tables of mem- ory as trivial records, and the memory of the ghost is emblazoned thereon to live there ever after. The dialogue given in the play is short, but by most exquisite implication it is clear that it lasted for the hours from midnight until the paling fires of the glow-worm showed the coming of the dawn. The imagination is left under the influence of conjecture as to what else there was of that discourse between the earthly son and the spectral 8 HAMLET. father, burning with his purgation of fire. What other discloeuree did the phantom make? "Was it a prophet, whose revelations gave to Hamlet that piercing insight into facts and motives which he afterwards displayed? Did it crush the hopes of the fair Ophelia in its ghostly hands? Did its adjurations, its revelations, and the duties which it laid upon the conscience of Hamlet, prove even then too much for that breaking heart, and con- vince him even then that his life must be a wreck; that he was to be his own fate ; that fate which he so often afterwards hung back from, even while he heard it calling out and felt it dragging him for- ward to the brink of Ophelia's grave, to the poisoned cup, and the exchanged sword? But few of the words are written which were spoken by our Lord during the forty days in which He walked the earth after the Resurrection ; but that He did many signs, shewed many infallible proofs, and spoke of the things concerning His kingdom, is written, which, it is not to be doubted, gave to His followers that miraculous power of spiritual conquest which they immediately exhib- ited. The art of the play has here imitated the fact of the highest truth, by leaving more to con- jecture than it has given to knowledge. It is quite essential to any estimate of Hamlet ' to know of what age we must consider him. It has been thought that he was an immature youth,. HAMLET. 9 just from the university. This opinion is grounded partly upon his greeting Horatio as just from Wittenberg. But it is to be observed that he does not speak to hrtn as to a school-fellow. The king, it is true, expostulates against the intention of Hamlet to return to the university. But the expostulation is the expression of a desire simply, and not of a command;, while the tone in which the mother expresses her wish is such as she would employ in persuading a son of mature years. Hamlet, though passed beyond his under-graduate days, may well have wished to seek the quiet solace of academic life in the enjoyment of what we may call a fellowship at the university. It is inferable from his greeting to the players that it has been a long time since he has seen them, whether at the university or during his free life in the unnamed city afterwards. It is true that Laertes speaks of his favor towards Ophelia as a violet in the youth of primy nature, but this is the vehement exaggeration of advice to a sister, and his language must be understood as meaning only that the nature of Handet is still crescent. The sexton expressly states Hamlet's age as thirty years, and the soliloquy of the prince over the skull of Yorick, with the answer given by the grave-digger that it is the skull of the jester, and that it has lain in the earth three and twenty years, show that Hamlet is in the very fullness of physi- 2 10 HAMLET. • cal and intellectual life; that he is at that age when judgment and action go hand in hand. Ophelia deplores his mental overthrow as that of the courtier, scholar and soldier, and her language throughout implies that he is much her elder. His mother nowhere schools him, while he, on the con- trary, assumes over her that pleasing and tender dominance of the matm-e man over his mother, which, in actual life, is one of the loveliest exhibi- tions of human, nature paying back its debt. !N^ow the man of thirty years is not the same man he was before, or that he will be afterwards. Scholarly men, who are at once ambitious, amiable, imaginative and melancholic, find that this age dates an era. The finiit of life is in its fullest sweetness ; it has been handled though, and some of its bloom has been brushed away by tarnishing hands. Hope still flies radiantly before, but she is often accompanied and vexed by her somber sister angel of disappointment. The realities of life are upon the man with all the force of their first onset. He makes estimates of the inherent nothingness of the unvalued treasures of youth. Love has, it may be, proved not eternal. Unbelief throws its shadow over the grave, and extinguishes the light beyond it. At times these brighten, and life, the future, eternity, become radiant with the visit- ing forms of early hopes and dreams. He walks an enchanted hall, where all seems fair and mas- HAMLET. 11 sive, and yet some of its pillars are granite, and some are rolled up mists; some of its denizens are real and warm, while others are shadows and dis- solve in the embrace; some walk the happy paths, while others are sorrows older than the pre-adamite kings in Vathek, and wander there in silence, holding their hands over hearts of never-dying fire. It is further to be remarked that Hamlet is the only character portrayed by Shakespeare which we do not understand, or at least affect to under- stand. We know Macbeth and his wife as guilty ambition — the woman with all the devil's uncon- querable daring, the man with all a man's fitful yet remorseless resolution, kindled of hell by the power of hell's darling temptress. We know Richard and lago: they are wickedness person- ified; the one gross and patent, the other gross, yet motiveless as the malice of some sexless mon- ster created for another world than ours, with all man's intellect yet with none of man's human nature. We know Othello. He is a noble, brave and credulous man, duped by jealousy, who kills his wife, not in revenge, but all in the honor of justice, in whose tribunal he has presided in the agony of judgment. Lear is a more complex character, but we can see as plainly as if he were Diocletian or Charles that he is senile royalty, royally giving away his crown as if it. were the plaything of his second childhood, and afterwards 12 HA ML E T. roused to wrath by flllal "mgratitude, whence blazo up all the (ires oC his Ihiroo and \\%v\ niituro IV«)in the ashes in whicii they were dyiiiK? m that particular fault. Hamlet's faculties are o'ergrown by a complex- ion which has broken down the pales and forts of reason; they are all swallowed up in an over- whelming emotion, thus presenting one of the indubitable tests above stated. They were nearly all thus absorbed before the ghost appeared, but after that their absorption became complete. It was thence not gradual, biit was the instan- taneous result of a shock in that early dawn which wai'ned away the phantom of the king. Hamlet then and there wipes away from the tables of his memory 28 HAMLBT. all biTial, fond reooids. All sa\ra of bookB, all fanns, all pieesnree past, That yontii and observatiaii oopiad there. And thy oommandment aQ alone shall live 'WitMn tiie book and -volume of my biain, Uumix'd -wiQi baser matter. He confirms this resolution with a yow, and seals it "with a prayer and "so be it" In this instantaneous dedication of himself to a life-long purpose, he displays in the very act the most sub- tile forethought. He bafles the solicitude of Horatio with persiflage, and afterwards appeals m the most solenm manner to the honor of his com- panions, as gentlemen, to promise, and to hallow that promise with a vow. that they wiU never make known what they have seen. It is very apparent from the advice given by Laertes to his sister Ophelia, and fi>om what after- wards occurred, that the love which the prince bore towards this most fragrant flower of woman- hood was very great, and that it pencilled with one long, radiant yet narrow gleam, the cloud which hung upon him. Xow, insane melancholy will make men forget love : or put it by for a time, take it up again, put it by. and again take' it up, so often as to weai- it down to a tender and atten- uated regret. This is precisely what occurs here. Ophelia is sent slowly whirling at first around the exta'eme edge of that awful northern maelstrom, is drawn to its center by the forces of those HAMLET. 29 dreadful spirals of grief, to be sucked down utterly at last into its dark vortex, never to appear again until cast up to drift, shattered, yet lovely, heav- enward over the eternal sea. "Within a very short time after thp scene upon the platform, Hamlet appeal's before her in garb, in gestm'e and in action, the very impersonation of a mind possessed by one controlling and ecstatic emotion. That he is changed to a man of one mood is apparent to all persons about him. To the king it is a " transformation." To his mother he is her " too much changed son." The symptom of consciousness of his malady is not wanting. Again and again he questions the reality of the vision which he has seen. He piteously pleads before Laertes that it was his own distraction, his madness; that it was the waiTing faction of insanity — Hamlet's enemy — and not Hamlet, which killed Polonius and crazed Ophelia. The idea of suicide presents itself much more persuasively than it did at fli-st. He now actually meditates self-slaughter. To be or not to be becomes ike question. His fost utterance upon that subject was a Avish that it were forbidden by God. In his second communion with the topic the religious restraint does not influence him, but he is withheld by an argument which is demon- strative of his mental alienation, for " insomnia, disturbed di'eams, and intensely agonizing dread 30 SA ML E T. of falling asleep, from the anticipation of dream- ing, and awaking with horrible sensations," are, as we have seen, among the earliest symptoms of such mental disorder as we are attributing to Hamlet. That he was thus afllicted, abundantly appears. He exclaims: "O, Grod! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have had bad dreams." The terrorizing fury of his life, this dread of sleep and dreams, is the countercheck to the assault which the impulse to coromit suicide makes upon him. To sleep the sleep of death, and dream are more terrible than the miseries of life, because even in death he fears that he must suffer under the broodings of its everlasting visions. To die, — to sleep ! To sleep ! perchance to dream — aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come. When we have shuffled oflf this mortal coU, Must give us pause. How wonderful is this fear, how dreadful "this delusion I That death is a dreamful sleep. That our fretful, little life there finds no rest, but is cast upon a limitless, heaving ocean of agony. That there there can be no awakening into miseries which, though awful, are, by contrast, balm and peace to the soul, tortured by those eternal trances of sorrow and horror, by those visions which HAMLET. 31 unroll from everlasting to everlasting, which the will does not evoke and cannot exercise. The argument with which he thus refutes his desire is not only the symptom of insane melancholy, but is also a negation of all religious belief, conso- lation or restraint, and is a delusion which makes the grave, not the garden of resurrection, but the bed of eternal, anarchic and dreaming sleep. Let us contrast two personages who have been presented to us dramatically — Hamlet as given to us by Shakespeare, and Socrates by Plato. Soc- rates, the soundest intellect of all men, showed that his massive mind stood plumb on its founda- tions, by arguing in the Phaedo against suicide just before he drank the hemlock. He also argues in the Apologia, before his judges, that if the soul be not immortal, and if he shall not after death talk with Orpheus, Musseus, and Hesiod and Homer, nor with Telamonian Ajax or Agamem- non or Ulysses, — if death be merely sleep, still it is preferable to life, for in his sleep of death no dreams will come, while Hamlet, whom Shakes- peare has endowed with specidative powers of Socratic subtility, fears death, and holds it more horrible than the woefuUest life, because in that everlasting sleep dreams will engender through all eternity. We also see in Hamlet the recurrence of those short periods in the course of his disorder, during 32 HAMLET. which he is actually maniacal. Immediately after the ghost vanishes from the platform, and as a reyulsion from that strain of thought wherein he dedicates himself to revenge, he commits the trivial and inconsequent act of setting down the platitude that one may smile and smile and be a villain, at least in Denmark — " so uncle, there you are." This quiet act is the rigor mortis of a dead reason. The silly explanation given his friends immediately thereafter, that "there's ne'er a vil- lain dwelling in all Demnark but he's an arrant knave " are the " whirling words," which betray incoherency of thought. His demeanor towards Ophelia at their first meeting is that of dementia. His conversation with Polonius, and his letter to Ophelia, are not feignings; they are incoherencies. That solemn and stately meditation upon suicide is checked — perhaps the deed is checked — by his coming upon Ophelia at her orisons, and at once there is an intervention of incoherency which is filled with that rhapsody of discourtesy so subtly tempered withal with love wailing over its lost object, which causes her to implore the sweet heavens to help him, to restore him, and makes her mourn over the overthrow of that mind blasted with ecstasy. So in the church-yard, his melan- choly reasons over mortality, with expressions, whose funereal stateliness is not surpassed by Jeremy Taylor or by Sir Thomas Browne, but HAMLET. 33 when he learns by the pathetic prayer of Laertes, adjuring that violets may spring from the fair and unpolluted flesh of her who is thus brought home with bell and burial, and her maiden strewments only, that it is the fair Opheha who is brought to tenant the narrow house, he raves, and, in the language of his mother, to. whom such scenes seem familiar, awhile the fit will work on him. Anon, as patient as the female dove, When that her golden couplets are disclosed. His sUence will sit drooping. The authorities declare that " melancholic pa- tients will not only conceal but sometimes deny their delusions." We find Hamlet denying his condition to his friends at the very outset. The ghost has just vanished, and before Hamlet has had time to form the complex plan of feigning madness for the purpose of revenge, while he is still shocked to the very center of his intellectual and emotional being, while he feels his mind giv- ing way, and knows that its ruin must be suspected immediately, as it was suspected, he announces his intention to put an antic disposition on. This is "insanity simulated by an unsound mind." The reports of the criminal law abound in cases of this character, where persons, unques- tionably alienated from their minds, have feigned a supererogatory insanity, sometimes for purposes 5 34 HAMLET. of defense, in anticipation and as an accessory to the act for which the real insanity is a sufficient defense. The same remarks are true concerning his assertions of his sanity to the spies and to his mother. Polonius, the aged counselor, and the most experienced man at the court, has no doubt of Hamlet's insanity, and that Polonius, senile though he was, was rich in the fruits of observation, thoroughly appears. He describes the stages of the declension of the prince into insanity in terms which medical authorities admit are scientifically accurate. He Fell into a sadness; then into a fast; Thence to a watch; thence into a weakness; Thence to a lightness; and by this declension. Into the madness wherein now he raves. Horatio nowhere gives any opinion upon this question. His silence was demanded by what he had seen and the promise he had made, for a word from him would have called for a full disclosure. The fact that he, at no time, even in soliloquy, declares his friend sane, when lover, mother, friends and enemies declare him mad, is that silence, by one who is bound to speak, which the law of evi- dence considers affirmative testimony by reason of acquiescence in the asserted and apparent fact. It is true that Hamlet often insists that_he is not mad. So do all insane persons. It is their great grievance to be so considered. Their explan- HAMLET. 35 ation that they are feigning insanity for a purpose is not an unusual one, and it is a very obvious piece of craft. Even in the scene where he balks the treacherous curiosity of the spies by assert- ing that his uncle-father, and aunt-mother are deceived concerning his madness, he admits the fact, as lunatics often will in their most plausible arguments of denial. He concedes that he is mad at times, and uses the well-known supposition of the influence of atmospheric conditions to account for his intermittent distemper. In his interview with his mother he denies his madness J but when did any person of unsound mind, craftily following a purpose, fail to do that in the supreme moment when that purpose is being accomplished upon its object? It is generally upon irrelevant and collateral occasions that the infirmity stands self-confessed. Many insane per- sons are so at times only, and under the influence of provocative causes. So wonderfully balanced are we that a word, an odor, a reminiscence, a thought, may unpoise us. The test to which he challenges his mother is declaratory of his mood at that moment. He would gambol from the mat- ter, and could not, and would not, propose to reword it in those scenes of incoherency to which reference has been made. When to all this is added the fact that in cases of emotional and melancholic insanity the intel- 36 HAMLET. lectual faculties are not destroyed, but are so far implicated in the disorder that they cannot save the patient, but lend their aid to his alienation, and do this sometimes knowingly, yet with no power to move the will to resist the confederacy, it can- not well be doubted that Hamlet was an insane person within the strictest definitions. The catastrophe indicates that Shakespeare intended to so represent him. Had he been sane, the dying close of this tragedy would have brought happiness to him and retribution to the guilty only. But Shakespeare so enmeshed Hamlet in the web of his madness that the drama was enforced to end as it does end. His father mur- dered, his mother depraved, the woman he loved crazed and dead, himself mad, and so declared by all the world, it was not within the compass of even Shakespeare's art to give the kingdom to Hamlet, and make him reign long and happily with a beauteous queen and a royal stock of chil- dren. Even the Promethean hand of the Master could not call back to that wasted and darkling sun the rays of reason from the infinite chaos of distraction which they illuminated, at once engen- dering and disclosing its horrors, and relume that orb with the light of its morning. And so guilt and innocence are swept away together to their last resting place, and an alien sits upon the throne of Denmark. SAMLET. 37 We have been observing Hamlet as if he were real. Marvellous art of the magician! To sway us with a shadow, a shadow's love, a shadow's grief, a shadow's intellect, and the madness of a shade ! To make this phantom not only what it is as such, but to make its phantom mind a prob- lem forever! For this Hamlet, whom we know, never was. The past held him not, nor shall we meet him " in the court of Heaven." He moldered with the creative brain under the chancel of Stratford church. But after all is he unreal? What is reality in such cases? The fleshliest incubus is real. The grossest prince who lives and dies is an actual being. But, for this earth, his reality ends with his death. Seldom does a vibration from him reach much beyond his generation. A few years, and no one hears him. As well lay the ear over his grave to listen to his soliloquies. ~E.ot so this ideal prince. He stands to-day appareled in im- perial robes, not a statue, but regnant over each successive generation; not shunned like the wan- dering Jew, but loved and obeyed and pitied. His kingdom widens as the years pass by. He sets up his monarchy in empires and republics alike; in Indian cities to survive their gods, in Australasian continents and islands. Ships glid- ing over lonely seas keep his state. He sways the 38 HA ML E T. luind in the long winters of arctic horror and in African deserts. Is he not then a most enduring reality? No other character in literature has this omnipresence and immortality. Why is this so? It is because Hamlet is man, and he is every man. He is kept alive by all men by self-recognition. He, calm and impassive, now that his bitter experience is all over, can tell us what we are. We see in him our inmost parts, our grossest attributes, our most evanescent spiritualities. His is our life, and we see " what a piece of work is a man." We come face to face with life. There it is all stretched before us, so beautiful to see that we can- not think it has an end. But from the very dew and flowers of our spring exhales a poison which blasts us forever — and we are Hamlet. Life goes on, but our great purposes are beaten down by some malign force; the diadems of suc- cess with which we crown ourselves bum upon our brows and consume us; our wills become infirm; we palter with our duties; we resolve that we will act the part of men, but fail to do so in the very midst of our resolutions — and we are Hamlet. We are snatched up by some convulsion, and are hurled to and fro as if the powers of the air were making their devilish sport with us in the coldest regions of upper darkness — and we are Hamlet. HAMLET. 39 Love, Paphian at once and pui-e, comes towards us like a dawn, caroling with all the music of the morning, garlanded and bearing wreaths of all the flowers. But even as she reaches forth her embracing arms, her face wans, her eye darkles, her mind wanders away, the song becomes a dirge, the flowers fade, and she hands us fennel and me, rosemaries for remembrance and pansies for thought, all withered — ^and we are Haimlet. And then we change. Melancholy claims us. God alone knows us and pities us. We make delusions our famihars and our home is darkness ; life ends with no purpose accomplished, ourselves a riddle — and we are Hamlet to the grave. MADAME ROLAND. MADAME ROLAND. The field of history is so vast that the student derives his completest instruction from biogra- phies. They epitomize eras, they raise the dead and make us enjoy or suffer with those who long ago passed away. They are to history what battle fields are to geography — ^the decisive places where examples of all that man can do or suffer are crowded into a little tract, there to be immor- talized. "We are all, at our best, fiction makers, l^o one reads history by the true perspective. We idealize as well what is commonplace and near as that which is strange and far away. With biographies we can indulge, this realistic dreaming to its full extent. When we see thus impersonated an era or an event, the colors gay of old Bomanoe shoot through the sober tissue of fact, tapestry it with that which never was, and yet which might have been, and instead of verity produce an ideal which is perhaps the highest type of history; because, besides declaring what has been done, it • also shows what was possible. 44 MADAME ROLAND. Failures find here splendid compensations. We can see how great genius and great patience ought to have prevailed, although they did not, over the accidents by which they were wrecked, and so in after days they become as exemplary as if their success had been consummate. They thus outhve cotemporary censure, are praised by posterity for what they deserved, instead of pitied for what they suffered, or blamed for their faults, and reaching from olden tombs their spectral arms, sway events which were too strong for them in the days when they were on earth. In this tendency to consider events by knowing the persons who were involved in them, exists a test of a most interesting subject. As astrono- mers measure the spaces of the sky by the micrometer, so the achievements and capacity of nations or classes are often estimated by what individuals thereof have accomplished. And in these days, when the capacity of woman for affairs is vehemently asserted by powerful thinkers, while by others it is earnestly objected that there inhere in her sex organic traits which not only unfit its members for such duties, but which, if given full scope, would create an incurable discord in civil administration; when from all points of view the question has been forced upon every thoughtful person, whether as regards her personal liberty, her right to property, to employment in industrial MADAME ROLAND. 45 pursuits, and to the exercise of political functions, her history is not one long story of unpalliated injustice — the life of a woman who acted a large part in scenes of greatest exigency, with or in opposition to men of greatest capacity, and of greatest contrasted goodness and depravity; a woman who suffered to the last extreme in the most frightful struggle which humanity ever made against authority, and in which the power of the individual was often greater than armies, than the hierarchy, than the laws, than all these put together and warring against him — such a life is instructive, not only upon the history of that time, but also upon those other problems now pressing for practical solution. And it will also bear upon these topics if the char- acteristics and deeds of other influential women receive such incidental reference as may be consis- tent with the limitations of such an occasion as this. The assemblage is most grotesque. Women appear with women whom no old social formula could ever have brought into contact. In the great shipwreck, the wife, the harlot, the actress, the nun, the queen, stand together, and they seem to have often exchanged characteristic traits. The application of the careers of these women to the political and social questions of which I have spoken cannot be refused. It suggests many questions, doubts and misgivings. 46 MADAME BOLAND. It asks why it is that we see in every land, in every age, great political and social agitations saddened in heart-rending tragedies by Beauty and anguiBh walking hand in hand The downward slope to death ? Are these frightful immolations simply personal calamities, or are they the manifestations of a law which converges upon a woman when she leaves her home to lead armies, to counsel states, to execute measures, reprisals against which her sex has never been a plea for mercy, but rather always an apparent pretext for their execution? Do the reasons for this inhere in our nature, or are they the mere monstrosities of institutions and usage? These heroines come with dance and song of welcome to greet triumphant revolutions, like the daughter of Jephthah from Mizpeh, and then Fate gives them over to martyrdom as if to fulfill a vow. Their lives are the rubric of history, for they are written in blood. With what touching monodies all literature has ministered at the exequies of this sisterhood of sorrow! They sad- den the dawn of time, and cry out for aid and rescue from every recess of the past. By the dark-ribbed ships at Aulis sweet Iphigenia feels the knife. Perpetua gazes upwards from the arena, and sees beyond the silken firmament of that hell, her Redeemer, bending from Heaven to take her as his bride. Hypatia, deserted by all Olympus, MADAME ROLAND. 47 and appealing in vain to Christ, stands naked in the church, gleaming for a moment like a statue of purest ivory, and is then shattered and rent to pieces by monks. Forgotten, but for her, are fierce Talbot and cruel Beauvais, but the face of Joan of Arc will shine forever from her cowl of flame. Scottish Mary, child of sorrow, genius, suffer- ing and sin, stands monumental in the hall of Fotheringay, all her ambition, her loving, her poetry and her music brought down to this, carry- ing into her grave a sorrow so epical that it will sadden hearts forever, mourned in disconsolate ballads, bewailed in stately ^oems, sorrowed for in romantic history and in historical romance. And last and greatest martyr of them all, a modern woman, and yet of antique grandeur of proportion, beautiful, learned and good, Madame Roland rises in immortal transfiguration upon the scaffold the last sad martyr by whom this sorrow- ful problem is expressed. We shall also catch glimpses of some of those Titanic men who shouldered the world aside and affronted Heaven itself to make way for their own conceptions. It was an age when individuals asserted them- selves against laws. Mankind went by violent and sanguinary retroversion back to their natural and imprescriptible rights. The concrete institu- tions against which man in his personahty revolted, 48 MADAME ROLAND. were overloaded with cruelty, disparity and injus- tice, and the revolt was the most destructive of order, life and property that the world has ever seen. It was not only a revolution, it was a retri- bution also. The masses looked everywhere for leaders against constituted authority, and leaders were not wanting. Men came from the nobility, from the clergy, from the lawyers, from the shops, from the furrow, from the stables. Women came from the homes, from the palace, from the nun- nery, from the bagnio, and by the fierce heat of that consuming collision, the fusion was like that effected by the lava of Yesuvius, which rolled and melted together in the streets of the Roman cities, the warrior's helmet, the scholar's stylus, the glad- iator's trident, the woman's necklace, and the baby's toy. I^o accidental collocation of events acting recip- rocally produced all this. The hoarded wrongs of centuries came forth with retributory force. The hoarded wisdom of all the ages fought its way to institutional recognition. The martyrs of all time revived and spoke from the stake, the cross, the scaffold and the rack. The very laws of time seemed as fully abrogated as were the social dis- tinctions of the moment. Men walked the streets of Paris from Plutarch's pages, from Suetonius' and Tacitus' direful chapters of cruelty. All that had ever been great, all that had ever been little, MAHAMB JSOLAHIK ^ all that had ever been inerdfal> all that had ever been cruel, found personal exponents, who not wHj showed theuiiselTes, but who also wielded the iDstramentalities of power and action. The ragn of Louis XlV was e^ootially the mo^t perfi>ct despotism of modern times. His control oyer the fiyes and property of all Ms subjecti^, of whatever rank, was perfectly imre- stnined. He was the State, and for nearly two generations the imperious will of this man, vHtio was not great or just or benignant, wasted the intellectual and physical substance of France in that s^endid and hollow pageant which bediz^tied lu$ rdgn. Ag^resdve abroad, he was repressiye at home. It was in many respects a rdgn of forms, and not of substance. Of tiiese insubstantial fium^ those of formal religion wtuf^d mtfi resist- le^ power, palsied the actire fbrt^s/^ constaence, buried free thought in dungeons, and stifled tiiem by ritualistic prece^s. Widi his death ceased the long incantation which had emblazoned France with sc^oic glory, and the pouq^us greatness wlu<^ it had eroiked vanished like a shadow. He was succeeded by tiie most abandoned WT^ch that ever shamed a croAvn. His r^gn is