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THE 
 
 GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 AND OTHER .£SSAYS IN 
 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, LL.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, CATHOLIC 
 UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA 
 
 CHICAGO 
 A. C. McCLURG & CO, 
 
 1906 
 
LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two C0DIC9 Recdved 
 
 APR 5 1906 
 
 i»yrL'ht Entry 
 
 /^ 
 
 COPY 
 
 m 
 
 
 ^ hakijfcpc'u r ' t an > ! 
 
 Copyright by 
 
 A. C. McClurg & Co. 
 
 1906 
 
 Published March 28, 1906 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE| U. S. A, 
 
TO 
 
 JOHN LANCASTER SPALDING 
 
NOTE 
 
 These pieces are called essays in comparative 
 literature because they are founded on qualities 
 in literature that constantly connote compari- 
 son, contrast, and the influence of the writer on 
 readers or hearers, who in turn affect him. 
 
 Maurice Francis Egan. 
 
6 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. The Ghost in Hamlet 1 1 
 
 II. Some Phases of Shakespearean Inter- 
 pretation 49 
 
 III. Some Pedagogical Uses of Shakespeare 79 
 
 IV. Lyrism in Shakespeare's Comedies . 1 1 1 
 
 V. The Puzzle of Hamlet .... 139 
 
 VI. The Greatest of Shakespeare's Con- 
 temporaries 171 
 
 VII. Imitators of Shakespeare . . . . 201 
 
 VIII. The Comparative Method in Lit- 
 erature 235 
 
 IX. A Definition of Literature . . . 267 
 
 X. The Ebb and Flow of Romance . . 293 
 
THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
The Ghost in Hamlet 
 and other Essays 
 
 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 THE number of questions raised 
 by Shakespeare's "Hamlet" have 
 been legion ; but there can be 
 no question as to the remote source of 
 the play. It was the " Historic of Ham- 
 blet," attributed to Saxo Grammaticus, 
 who wrote it as a chapter in the history 
 of Denmark. It was translated into 
 French by Belleforest, and " imprinted '* 
 in English " by Richard Bradocke, for 
 Thomas Pauier," at his shop " in Corne- 
 hill, neere to the Royall Exchange," Lon- 
 don, 1608. To students who yearn to 
 get at the meaning of the play, who are 
 more interested in Shakespeare's work 
 than in what he read or knew, it is of 
 little moment whether he found the story 
 of Hamlet in French or in English, or 
 
H THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 whether he drew it from an older dirAf»>» 
 than the one we find in the first and sec^r>^ 
 quartos and the first folio. "The play's 
 the thing." 
 
 It is quite evident that Shakespeare!? 
 Hamlet owes almost everything, excep"^ 
 illumination, the inexplicable synthetic 
 quality of genius, to the " Historie of 
 Hamblet.'* A careful comparison will 
 show this, though it will reveal the 
 marvellous transformation which mere 
 material takes in the hand of the artist; 
 as an example of the relations of the 
 chronicler to the poet, the power of com- 
 pilation to that of imaginative synthesis, 
 and life to literature, it is even more apt 
 than the study of the " Morte Arthure " 
 of Sir Thomas Malory in comparison with 
 the "Idyls of the King." 
 
 There can be no doubt that " Hamlet " 
 is the study of a mind, a study, — it seems 
 absurd at this time in the life of the Trag- 
 edy to ust an adjective to qualify it, — a 
 consummate study of a very delicate yet 
 not unbalanced mind. But since Goethe 
 wrote, after the faint praise of Dryden 
 and the neglect of so many years, it has 
 been so much the fashion to strive to 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 15 
 
 jfuvdjl beyond this complete and adequate 
 j^^^y, that those of the public who read 
 a^la^ut Shakespeare without reading his 
 W/orks are justified in concluding that the 
 xuthor of " Hamlet " neglected his duty 
 fH not leaving a " key " to it. We have 
 ^ery reason to believe that the Eliza- 
 bethans understood " Hamlet " ; that they 
 desired no lecturers to explain it before 
 the scene at Elsinore opened ; that it was 
 not in their opinion a problem play. 
 Why, then, should it be in our time 
 obscure to so many who express such 
 unbounded and even ecstatic love for it? 
 The motive and the action are entirely 
 clear when not mutilated in their expres- 
 sion to suit the demands of the modern 
 theatre. Naturally, a change has taken 
 place in the point of view. Auditors of 
 to-day do not look on the divinity that 
 formerly hedged a king as a quality of 
 daily life, but they expect in literature and 
 on the stage a condition of virtue and self- 
 sacrifice — altruism is the word — which is 
 not usual in their thoughts in dealing with 
 their everyday relations with their neigh- 
 bors. For instance, the millionaire who 
 forecloses a mortgage on the land of a 
 
i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 struggling farmer is a monster in a novel 
 or on the stage, and poetry shudders at 
 him ; but in real life he dines with other 
 persons who have hurled murderers to 
 justice, pleaded in court for the vengeance 
 of the law upon lesser offenders, and who 
 would not hesitate to shoot in hot or cold 
 blood the insulters or injurers of their 
 fathers, mothers, wives, or children. Of 
 Hamlet the Prince, whose father has been 
 killed foully, whose mother has been 
 stained and degraded in sight of his peo- 
 ple, whose kingdom has been usurped, 
 even by the election of the corrupt nobles 
 and the connivance of that demoralized 
 mother, the auditors of to-day demand, 
 as a matter of course, an excessive altru- 
 ism based on Christian principles seldom 
 applied in modern life to actual condi- 
 tions. Hamlet's plain duty, in the trag- 
 edy, is to obey the command of his 
 father's spirit. The Elizabethans saw it 
 in this way. It was clear, according to 
 their ethics, that Hamlet's struggle was 
 a struggle against duty, not a virtuous 
 doubt as to whether it was right for him 
 to destroy the clever, kingly, unscru- 
 pulous, and subtle villain whose sin 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 17 
 
 in marrying his brother's wife, coupled 
 with the rumor of a more horrible and 
 secret crime, darkened and threatened to 
 curse the whole State of Denmark. Miss 
 Fredericka Beardsley Gilchrist, in a re- 
 markably frank and original interpre- 
 tation of ^* The True Story of Hamlet 
 and Ophelia," ^ says of the reader of 
 Shakespeare : 
 
 " He must be ready to believe that Shake- 
 speare's text contains all the material needed to 
 make the play intelligible, and he must seek for 
 the meaning of the text, without considering 
 what this or that commentator thinks about it. 
 At the same time he must remember that play- 
 goers of Shakespeare's day probably compre- 
 hended the drama perfectly, for they possessed 
 a help to its understanding which we have not, 
 — the actors who portrayed it knew what 
 Shakespeare intended them to portray. This 
 the modern student must discern for himself, 
 remembering always that the text, unless it has 
 been hopelessly distorted, is subject to the same 
 interpretation now as then." 
 
 The modern student receives, as a rule, 
 very little help from the modern actor, 
 
 J Boston : Little, Brown, Sc Co., 1889. 
 2 
 
i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 who arranges Shakespeare's plays to suit 
 his special powers, and who does not hesi- 
 tate to " adapt " speeches and to cut out 
 such passages as he chooses. It is not to 
 the theatre that the student must go for 
 aid, but to "Hamlet" itself, as seen in 
 the text collated by the help of the two 
 quartos and the first folio. He will find 
 certain inconsistencies, some merely appar- 
 ent because of his lack of ability to pro- 
 ject himself into Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 England. This lack of ability is not con- 
 fined to the student, but to the commen- 
 tators whom he, often in spite of his own 
 better judgment, or rather his instinct, 
 follows. 
 
 One of the most flagrant examples of 
 this blind following of the opinions of 
 others is shown in the varying comments 
 on the position of the Ghost, — a most 
 important x)ne in " Hamlet." It did not 
 surprise the English of the beginning of 
 the seventeenth century that the mur- 
 dered King should come from the state 
 of purgation in which many Englishmen 
 still believed. It is impossible to kill the 
 vital beliefs of a nation by mere edicts ; 
 and the announcement of King Hamlet 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 19 
 
 that he had been murdered without 
 chance of confession, with his sins upon 
 his soul, did not imply, as it would have 
 implied to the Puritan mind, that he was 
 either in heaven or hell. He was in the 
 middle state, suffering terribly, knowing, 
 too, that his beloved kingdom of Den- 
 mark was in the grip of a monstrous 
 usurper, and that, if his son were not 
 awakened to the danger of the moment, 
 his dynasty must pass, perhaps forever, 
 from the throne. The auditors, in Shake- 
 speare's time, took the Ghost seriously. 
 He was not merely a piece of perfunc- 
 tory stage machinery; he was the better 
 part of a good man — not a saintly man 
 — and of a noble king. He had sinned, 
 but he had not died in mortal sin ; he 
 was suffering in purging fire, with the tor- 
 ment of an awful secret upon him, fore- 
 knowing that, as a king and a patriot, he 
 ought to reveal this secret to the Prince, 
 his son. He must be mute by day, but 
 at night he may speak, and he may not 
 reveal too much. Let us observe how 
 the mission and message of the Ghost 
 are, as a rule, treated. King Hamlet is 
 "^necessary to the play," and that is all ! 
 The Ghost is a stock figure in the dramas 
 
20 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 of the group of writers to which Shake- 
 speare belonged, and that is all ! He de- 
 mands revenge from a son too moral and 
 "modern-minded" to accept his dictum 
 of spirit, and that is all. These conclu- 
 sions are either frivolous or foolish. And 
 yet, unless the character of the Ghost be 
 made consistent with the Christian tradi- 
 tions of the time, they must be accepted. 
 If we accept them, the drama becomes both 
 frivolous and foolish; but as it is one of 
 the most solemn and sublime emanations 
 of human genius, they cannot be accepted. 
 The Ghost is not a mere theatrical fig- 
 ure. Hamlet is not a modern altruist, 
 analyzing his mind from the point of view 
 of Mr. Henry James and frightened by 
 the bloodthirsty demands of his father. 
 King Hamlet had been a creature of flesh 
 and blood, and he spoke in deadly ear- 
 nest, for the salvation of his kingdom, for 
 the punishment of sin, to his son, the heir 
 of that kingdom, the Prince of Denmark, 
 who on his mother's death would be 
 king. That other theory, that the Ghost 
 was an illusion, is dispersed very carefully 
 in the beginning of the play. With his 
 usual skill in making the intention of 
 the situation clear, Shakespeare converts 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 21 
 
 Horatio from a doubter to a believer fully 
 convinced. , The Ghost might be the illu- 
 sion of an overwrought mind, In the awful 
 scene between the mother and son, when 
 the example of Nero and Agrippina is 
 only too near Hamlet's vengeful mind ; 
 but the whole spirit of the tragedy is 
 against that supposition. Whatever might 
 be said in its favor should, however, be 
 considered ; but the letter, the meaning, 
 the movement of all the scenes in " Ham- 
 let " leading to the revelation of the be- 
 trayed and assassinated King, in whose 
 person the whole State of Denmark was 
 betrayed and assassinated, show that the 
 Ghost was a spirit, waiting, in suffering, 
 to be cleansed of the stains of earth. 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus wrote the story of 
 Hamlet in the twelfth century; the French 
 translation appeared in 1570; the only 
 edition we have of the English transla- 
 tion is put in 1608. Dr. Furnlvall, in 
 his preface to the " Leopold " Shake- 
 speare, says, " We know well how all Scan- 
 dinavian legend and history are full of the 
 duty of revenge for a father's murder." 
 This, however, would not have been 
 enough to prevent the mission and 
 
22 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 message of the Ghost from shocking the 
 moral sensibilities of the English people, 
 who loved to read " Hamlet/' as we see by 
 the number of printed editions, as well as 
 to see it acted. The scene was not put in 
 a pagan time, the sentiments of the play- 
 were not pagan ; the tone was much more 
 of the sixteenth century than of the sixth ; 
 therefore the fact that the duty of revenge 
 for a father's murder was inculcated in 
 Scandinavian literature would be insuffi- 
 cient, unless specially emphasized from a 
 pagan Scandinavian point of view, to 
 arouse the unqualified sympathy of the 
 English. It must be admitted that these 
 Elizabethans, like their contemporary 
 Spaniards and Italians, found nothing 
 offensive in a mixture of Christian sym- 
 bolism and pagan mythology in their 
 poems and plays ; but the spectacle of a 
 Christian king, lamenting his sinfulness, 
 demanding the blood of his murderer for 
 having cut him off from the consolations 
 and helps of religion,^ could scarcely have 
 
 I Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, 
 Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled, 
 No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
 With ail my imperfections on my head : 
 O, horrible ! O, horrible ! most horrible I 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 23 
 
 pleased auditors who were neither irrev- 
 erent nor unintelhgent, nor does any- 
 thing in Shakespeare's work warrant the 
 supposition that he would have presented 
 such a contradiction. It has been sug- 
 gested that Shakespeare's " Hamlet," fol- 
 lowing the " Historie of Hamblet," mixed 
 the pagan with the Christian in matters 
 more essential than mythological allusions ; 
 and it is true that the Hamblet of Saxo 
 Grammaticus and Belleforest had two 
 wives ; but then, his chronicler says, he 
 had not yet received the light of the Gos- 
 pel. The chronicler admires the Prince 
 of Denmark extremely, though he was 
 not a Christian, and he excuses his ven- 
 geance wreaked on his uncle Fengon 
 (Shakespeare's Claudius) by examples 
 from the Old Testament : 
 
 "If vengeance euer seemed to haue any shew 
 of iustice, it is then, when pietie and affection 
 constraineth vs to remember our fathers un- 
 iustly murdred, as the things wherby we are 
 dispensed withal, & which seeke the means not 
 to leaue treason and murther vnpunished : see- 
 ing Dauid a holy & iust king, & of nature sim- 
 ple, courteous and debonaire, yet when he dyed 
 he charged his sonne Salomon (that succeeded 
 
24 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 him in his throane) not to suffer certaine men 
 that had done him iniurie to escape vnpunished: 
 Not that this holy King (as then readie to dye. 
 and to giue account before God of all his ac- 
 tions) was carefull or desirous of reuenge, but 
 to leaue this example vnto us, that where the 
 Prince or Country is interessed, the desire of 
 reuenge cannot by any meanes (how smallj 
 soeuer) beare the title of condemnation, but is 
 rather commendable and worthy of praise : for 
 otherwise the good kings of luda, nor others 
 had not pursued them to death, that had of- 
 fended their predecessors, if God himselfe had 
 not inspired and ingrauen that desire within their 
 hearts. Hereof the Athenian laws beare wit- 
 nesse, whose custome was to erect Images in 
 remembrance of those men that, reuenging the 
 iniuries of the Common wealth, boldly massa- 
 cred tyrants and such as troubled the peace and 
 welfare of the Citizens." 
 
 This is the apology of a Christian 
 chronicler for a pagan prince, in which 
 reasons of state, as well as filial piety, are 
 cited. But the means by which Shake 
 speare's Hamlet discerns the murder anc 
 incest committed by his uncle are differ- 
 ent from those named in the " Historie 
 of Hamblet." No ghost appears in the 
 " Historie,** though it is hinted that 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 25 
 
 Hamblet the pagan was wise in divina- 
 tion, and that " it would seem miraculus 
 yt Hamblet shold divine in yt sort, which 
 often prooued so true (yt as I said be- 
 fore,) the diuel had not knowledge of 
 things past, but to grant it he knoweth 
 things to come," — this Hamblet having 
 been instructed in the devilish art whereby 
 " the wicked spirit abuseth mankind, and 
 advertiseth him, (as he can) of things 
 past." 
 
 In Shakespeare's " Hamlet " no such 
 education in deviltry is suggested. Ham- 
 let has thought deeply at Wittenberg, 
 where free thought was the fashion, but he 
 has not attempted, like Benvenuto Cellini, 
 to raise spirits. And Shakespeare fills the 
 Ghost with so much pathos, with such 
 nobility, that it is evident that the spirit 
 speaks not to deceive ; he has no connec- 
 tion with the arts of the devil, though at 
 times his son doubts him. To the eyes 
 of the Christian, — let us take the posi- 
 tion of the translators of the " His- 
 toric," for example, — the spectacle of 
 'i Christian son urged to personal ven- 
 geance by a Christian father, who hopes 
 for heaven, would be abhorrent ; and the 
 
26 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Elizabethans, who, if we may judge 
 by the dramas they loved best, insisted 
 on high ideals, would not have tolerated 
 it. Whatever may be said of the drama 
 in general, one thing is certain, — the 
 successful play must have the sympathy 
 of the audience. It is certain, then, that 
 " Hamlet," one of the most successful 
 of Shakespeare's plays, had that sym- 
 pathy ; and that Shakespeare deliberately 
 maintained it by exalting the mission 
 of the Ghost to the utmost is equally 
 certain. 
 
 In the " Historic," Geruth — the Ger- 
 trude of "Hamlet" — has fallen before 
 her husband's death ; her crime is " in- 
 cestuous," as it is with Shakespeare, v/ho 
 permits us to believe that Gertrude did 
 not sin lentil after her husband's death. It 
 is the same crime that Henry VIII, in his 
 delicate scrupulosity, insisted that he had 
 committed because his brother Arthur 
 had been husband to Queen Katharine. 
 The matter needed no explanation to the 
 citizens of London under Elizabeth or 
 James I. The whole subject had been, 
 and still was, a matter of moment con- 
 cerned much with the state of the realm. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 27 
 
 Both Church and State in England still 
 held the Catholic traditions about mar- 
 riage, though they had ostensibly rejected 
 its sacramental character. The sin of 
 Claudius and the Queen, the corruption 
 of the court, the melancholy of the 
 young Hamlet, the evil rumors of the 
 taking off of the King, — all these things 
 prepared men's minds for strange appari- 
 tions, and even the valiant soldiers guard- 
 ing the court were expectant that some 
 solemn or horrible event, on which 
 they had brooded during long winter 
 nights, would happen, betokening evil, at 
 Elsinore. 
 
 The soldiers, who fear nothing of flesh 
 and blood, tremble at every shadow. 
 There has been talk of a walking spirit, — 
 the spirit of a righteous king fearing some 
 ill that threatens his kingdom. Francisco 
 is on guard, just before the dawn, on this 
 night in the late Winter. Mystery is in 
 the air. The kingdom is alive with war- 
 like preparations. Are the people about to 
 rise against Claudius, who has wedded his 
 brother's wife with unseemly and indecent 
 haste, and been named king, doubtless at 
 her request, with equally indecent haste ? 
 
28 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The Prince Hamlet, bereft of his rightful 
 place, has proposed to lead no revolt (this 
 his few intimates about the court knew), 
 though many outside who love him would 
 be ready to follow him. There are many, 
 inaeed, out of and in the court, ready 
 to rid the country of the politic Clau- 
 dius, who holds his throne by diplomacy 
 and the favor of the Queen. Thinking 
 of what may happen in this sin-stained 
 land, — for the marriage of Claudius and 
 the Queen is incestuous, not only in the 
 minds of the Danes, but in the minds 
 of the auditors in London, — Francisco 
 stands, waiting for the guard to relieve 
 him. Bernardo comes, and just then 
 there is no glimpse of the moon through 
 the darkened air. He is afraid of no 
 earthly thing ; but the figure of the sen- 
 tinel panoplied in guise of war — for so 
 King Hamlet has appeared — startles 
 him. Instead of waiting for his comrade's 
 challenge, he calls out, almost tremulously, 
 " Who 's there ? " Francisco rebukes this 
 breach of military usage. " Nay, answer 
 me^^ he calls ; " stand and unfold your- 
 self" Much relieved by the sound of 
 this human voice, he answers naturally. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 29 
 
 " Long live the King ! " To which 
 Francisco, who has doubtless ' had his 
 own fears, says doubtfully : 
 
 Bernardo ? 
 Ber. He! 
 
 Francisco, no longer doubting, praises 
 his promptness. Bernardo, the man on 
 duty, says, with a sigh, 
 
 'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco. 
 Fran. For this relief much thanks ; *t is bitter 
 cold. 
 And I am sick at heart. 
 
 Bernardo is not heartened by this ; he 
 knows that the fear neither of battle nor 
 of sudden death ever made Francisco sick 
 at heart, but there are things not of earth 
 that make the bravest heart sick at thoughts 
 of th,em. He does not want to be alone. 
 He asks Francisco, on his way to bed, to 
 hasten the coming of the companions of 
 his watch, Horatio and Marcellus. Hap- 
 pily, they arrive before Francisco goes 
 away. Marcellus asks Bernardo at once 
 about the Ghost, which is uppermost in 
 all their minds, except in that of the well- 
 balanced Horatio, Bernardo is glad to 
 
30 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 say that he has seen nothing ; and here 
 Shakespeare makes sure that the auditors 
 shall understand that the Ghost is no illu- 
 sion. "Tush, tush, 'twill not appear," 
 the doubting but tolerant Horatio says. 
 It does appear, however. Horatio trem- 
 bles and looks pale. 
 
 Before my God, I might not this believe 
 Without the sensible and true avouch 
 Of mine own eyes. 
 
 Horatio is not a man to be easily 
 deceived. At every opportunity Shake- 
 speare takes occasion to show that. An- 
 other thing that Shakespeare makes plain 
 by every possible emphasis is that King 
 Hamlet comes not so much on a personal 
 mission as on a mission for the salvation 
 of Denmark. He comes as the Royal 
 Dane, the defender of his kingdom, clad 
 in all the panoply of a warrior king ; he 
 bears the truncheon, the symbol of kingly 
 power, — not "in his habit as he lived*' 
 as man, — not as he slept in the garden 
 after dinner, or as he had jested with his 
 little son and Yorick. He does not come 
 in the easy garb in which he was mur- 
 dered, to show himself to Hamlet disfigured 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 31 
 
 by the poison and to excite his anger. 
 The State is wounded in his royal person. 
 To paraphrase Louis XIV, " L'etat, c'est 
 lui." In striking him Claudius had struck 
 down religion, truth, loyalty, the very 
 essence and flower of law and order. He 
 was the anointed king of the Danes, as 
 James I was the anointed king and lord 
 of the Britons, — and the Britons were 
 not permitted to forget that the chrism 
 had touched that royal brow. It was not 
 necessary to explain the situation to them. 
 It was the sacred right and duty of a most 
 Christian king to put upon his heir the 
 burden of justice. Vengeance might be 
 the term used, but it was vengeance in the 
 Scriptural sense, " Vengeance is mine, saith 
 the Lord, I will repay." The murdered 
 king had no need to summon a jury ; he 
 was the instrument of the Lord ; vindic- 
 tive justice was righteous justice. Bound 
 for his sins to silence, he suffers more 
 than the agony of the purging fire, and 
 when his chance comes, the king and the 
 man, the patriot and the father, struggle 
 with one another in the ineffectual human 
 speech he is obliged to use. He cannot 
 speak as a spirit to a spirit ; he must speak 
 
32 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 as a man to a man, and he speaks by sym- 
 bols as well as words. Marcellus asks : 
 
 Is it not like the king? 
 Hor. As thou art to thyself: 
 Such was the very armour he had on 
 When he the ambitious Norway combated ; 
 So frowned he once, when, in an angry parle. 
 He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice. 
 *Tis strange. 
 
 Mar. Thus twice before, and jump at this dead 
 hour. 
 With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch. 
 
 Hor. In what particular thought to work I know 
 not ; 
 But in the gross and scope of my opinion. 
 This bodes some strange erupdon to our state. 
 
 The first — and evidently the logical 
 and natural — thought that strikes Hora- 
 tio is that the appearance of this figure 
 portends danger to the State. There 
 have been warlike preparations ; for young 
 Fortinbras, the antithesis of Hamlet, is 
 threatening the frontier, — knowing, no 
 doubt, of the rottenness within, having 
 wisely chosen his opportunity. As Ber- 
 nardo says, 
 
 This portentous figure 
 Comes armed through our watch ; so like the king 
 That was and is the question of these wars. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 33 
 
 Horatio, a scholar, versed in the lan- 
 guage of exorcism, and the natural leader 
 of those about him, makes the sign of the 
 cross before it. He appeals as a Chris- 
 tian and patriot to it. 
 
 Stay, illusion ! 
 If thou hast any sound, or use of voice. 
 Speak to me : 
 
 If there be any good thing to be done. 
 That may to thee do ease and grace to me. 
 Speak to me : 
 
 If thou art privy to thy country's fate. 
 Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, 
 O, speak ! 
 
 Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life 
 Extorted treasure in the womb of earth. 
 For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death. 
 Speak of it ! 
 
 The cock crows ; the spirit fades from 
 human sight, and Horatio feels that the 
 mystical creature will talk only to young 
 Hamlet. 
 
 Later, Hamlet speaks to Horatio of 
 his father, and in his scorn of his mother's 
 neglect of that noble shade and in his ten- 
 derness, says that his picture comes that 
 very moment to his mind. He speaks as 
 any sorrowing son would speak ; his father 
 3 
 
34 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 is before him, but he does not pretend 
 that it is the spirit of his father. There 
 is no delusion; Hamlet is not insane at 
 any time, and his amazement is great 
 when Horatio, whom of all men he cannot 
 doubt, says, still emphasizing the martial 
 and kingly bearing of the Ghost : 
 
 A figure like your father. 
 Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie. 
 Appears before them, and with solemn march 
 Goes slow and stately by them : thrice he walked 
 By their oppress' d and fear-surprised eyes. 
 Within his truncheon's length. 
 
 The accent on the military appearance of 
 the King is deepened. 
 
 Ham. Arm'd, say you? 
 
 n ' [■ Arm'd, my Lord. 
 
 Ham. From top to toe ? 
 
 ^^^' \ My Lord, from head to foot. 
 
 Hamlet asks other terse, intense ques- 
 tions ; and when the others have left him, 
 he concludes : 
 
 My father's spirit in arms ! all is not well ; 
 I doubt some foul play : would the night were come ! 
 Till then sit still, my soal : foul deeds will rise. 
 Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 35 
 
 To Hamlet, of a fine nature but not 
 of the stuff of which kings are made, the 
 appearance of his father's spirit has merely 
 a personal significance; and his failure — 
 for the climax of tragedy in the play is 
 not the death of Hamlet, but his failure 
 — to understand the high and noble 
 mission of the suffering King is the cause 
 of the ruin that comes on all except 
 Horatio. Horatio and Fortinbras are 
 brave and simple. Fortinbras isthought- 
 lessly resolute and straightforward ; a di- 
 rect line is his model. Horatio is more 
 sophisticated, — a higher type, — but, once 
 convinced, he acts ; once convinced, he 
 has neither scruples nor doubts. The 
 simple faith of Fortinbras gains Den- 
 mark for him ; the lack of complexity in 
 Horatio makes him the one sane, strong 
 man in the tragedy. Horatio thinks of 
 his country and of his duty to it ; Ham- 
 let's outlook does not go beyond his own 
 mind and heart. The horrible revelation 
 of his mother's fall drives him almost 
 mad, for he had revered and loved her 
 as immaculate. 
 
 Denmark must be purged, — the Ghost 
 dwells on the details of the foul crime. 
 
36 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 — that Denmark may not be the chosen 
 place of "luxury and damned incest." 
 
 But, howsoever thou pursuest 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 prick and sting her. 
 
 Hamlet, left alone, calls on the powers 
 of heaven and earth. " And shall I couple 
 hell ? " he asks, and for the moment re- 
 jects the temptation. He believes that 
 this is the spirit of his father. King and 
 Royal Dane; but he accepts the mission 
 as one of personal vengeance ; he begins 
 at once " to taint his mind " with thoughts 
 of revenge, not only on Claudius, but 
 on Queen Gertrude ; for the instant his 
 thoughts are as hellish as those of Nero 
 planning the death of Agrippina. He 
 vows himself — sweeping away ambition, 
 and the love of Ophelia, who cannot be 
 pure since the noblest of women is impure 
 
 — to vengeance. He is not the Prince, 
 the heir of the kingdom, the savior of j 
 his country, but the wronged man threat- I 
 ening to return evil for evil. The Ghost 
 can speak no more to him, for the morn is 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 37 
 
 near. The wounded heart of the man 
 had neutralized the cry for justice of the 
 King ; but it was too late : he could say 
 no more, but only " Taint not thy mind/' 
 The action was now with Hamlet; and 
 Hamlet, 
 
 Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, — 
 
 of the philosophic doubt of Wittenberg, 
 — is not great enough to understand. He 
 is "prompted to his revenge by heaven 
 and hell," he says. Fortinbras looks on 
 his mission as prompted by heaven, as 
 part of his duty to a father slain. Hora- 
 tio would have seen the welfare of the 
 kingdom at stake, but doubt makes 
 Hamlet weak. He trusts Horatio only; 
 he has no faith in the love of the people 
 for him, — that very people waiting, as 
 we see at the revolt of the ever-beloved 
 Laertes, to follow any brave man against 
 the incestuous King. Hamlet hesitates ; 
 the spirit may be the devil, who may 
 have assumed this pleasing shape to lead 
 him to damnation, as the evil one is 
 potent with melancholy minds, — and 
 Hamlet fears his own weakness and 
 melancholy. 
 
38 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 He must have another test ; he must 
 prove the truth of the Ghost, for he is not 
 strong enough to believe. That test he 
 appHes, all the while hanging on a revenge 
 prompted alike by heaven and hell. Why- 
 should he have coupled hell with the duty 
 of a prince and the sorrows of a son ? 
 The Ghost has not urged him to league 
 himself with evil. He has not asked him 
 to kill Claudius in hot blood or to com- 
 pass his ruin by intrigues. The truth is 
 that Hamlet is not noble enough to inter- 
 pret the message of his father. It is folly 
 to overload the situation of Hamlet with 
 arguments dravv'n from the theologians. 
 Shakespeare was not a scientific theolo- 
 gian. In the mood of men of his time, 
 who hoped for heaven and feared hell, it 
 was the duty of a man to bring the mur- 
 derer of another to justice, — much m.ore 
 so the duty of a prince to bring.the assas- 
 sin of a kingly father to justice. Claudius 
 had placed himself beyond the law, and 
 the pitiful heavens themselves shuddered 
 at his crimes, which cried aloud for justice. 
 As a person, Hamlet might have forgiven 
 Claudius and bidden him go his way and 
 sin no more, as the Ghost charitably 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 39 
 
 forgives Gertrude, thinking only of the 
 salvation of her " fighting soul." The 
 Ghost has no doubt of his right to com- 
 mand his son to punish the monster who 
 has deprived him of his human person- 
 ality and who is corrupting the kingdom. 
 The Ghost, to the auditors at the theatre 
 in London, represented the State ; he was 
 the anointed king demanding justice for 
 sacrilege, providing for the peace of the 
 kingdom, and the life even of the rightful 
 heir. The Ghost does not ask Hamlet to 
 kill for the mere pleasure of killing ; he 
 does not desire the loss of the soul of his 
 enemy, though this enemy has killed a 
 king and married with his wife. The 
 Ghost speaks as a king ; his woe and 
 agony are poured almost involuntarily 
 into the ear of his amiazed son ; and, 
 after he has cried out for vindictive jus- 
 tice, he remembers perhaps that he may be 
 misunderstood, and whispers to the Prince, 
 
 Taint not thy mind. 
 
 That Hamlet's test by the play con- 
 firms the truth of the message of the 
 Ghost we know, and that he delays action 
 we know. We can imagine how Fortinbras 
 
40 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 or even the half-corrupted Laertes would 
 have acted at this time. Horatio would 
 have understood the Ghost's words as 
 bidding him deprive the usurper of the 
 throne and save the Queen from the worst 
 in her. He would not have doubted nor 
 would he have let hate so overmaster him 
 as to desire to destroy the very soul of the 
 usurper of the throne. It would have suf- 
 ficed for him to know that Claudius was 
 the regicide, the enemy of society, the 
 outlaw, and he would have acted in ac- 
 cordance with the accepted principles of 
 justice. Having received the perturbed 
 spirit as that of the King, he would have 
 doubted no more. Evidence he would 
 doubtless have collected for its value to 
 others, but he would have needed no 
 other testimony to add to the avouch- 
 ment of his own eyes. As to hell, or 
 hatred which is of hell, or the satisfaction 
 of this hatred, it would have been cast 
 aside. Fortinbras would have attacked the 
 King and his court at once with a band 
 of resolutes ; Laertes would have hated 
 and raised the people. Hamlet, doubting 
 still, hates and hesitates. He spares the 
 King for fear that Claudius, dying at 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 41 
 
 prayer, may not be damned ; the pow- 
 ers of hell possess his soul ; he forg ets 
 the noble part of the message. He 
 rushes to his mother to accuse her. 
 
 Let not ever 
 The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom : 
 Let me be cruel, not unnatural ! 
 
 His heart has been filled with thoughts 
 of murder, in spite of the strict com- 
 mand of his father to be tender with her. 
 When she fears that he will kill her and 
 voices her fear, Polonius calls for help 
 and is killed, like a rat behind the arras. 
 Impatiently, urged by passion, Hamlet 
 would have cut the knot which he had 
 not sufficient strength to unweave. He 
 is passion's slave ; passion has made him 
 tardy ; he has doubted and raved, and 
 longed to taste the sweetness of satiated 
 hatred, yet never dared to strike. It is 
 passion or doubt, or doubt or passion, — 
 whichever is uppermost, — that has frozen 
 action. He has killed, and he wills to 
 kill ; he is not the Prince seeking justice 
 for a crime against the nation, but a mere 
 individual not even justifying the means 
 by the end ; he knows the end is bad ; he 
 
42 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 believes at times that the Ghost was the 
 devil, and he accepts his message devil- 
 ishly. Out of his weakness he has 
 coupled hell with heaven and earth ; out 
 of his weakness and passion comes the 
 murder of Polonius. The purpose the 
 Ghost proposed, as Royal Dane, guardian 
 and protector of the kingdom, is blunted 
 by the sleet of undisciplined rage. He 
 delights in torturing his mother. The 
 great heart of the King cannot endure 
 this ; he sees that his son has lost sight, 
 in the storm and stress of rage, of the 
 message of justice and righteousness. 
 Hamlet merely mutters and rages against 
 Claudius ; he cries out in bitter and per- 
 sonal scorn against him ; he raves ; he 
 contemns, — he is a vengeful boy, not 
 a just prince. "A king of shreds and 
 patches ! " he exclaims ; he knows how 
 to use words. Then comes the piteous 
 Ghost, stricken, tortured, not now in the 
 panoply of the King, truncheoned, majes- 
 tic, but "in his habit as he lived." He 
 appeals to Hamlet's nobler self, for the 
 real purpose of his midnight mission, 
 and for the Queen. 
 
 O, step betv/een her and her fighting soul ! 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 43 
 
 Hamlet is called from hell ; under the 
 influence of the Ghost's words, he urges 
 the Queen to repentance : 
 
 Queen. O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in 
 tv^ain. "^ 
 
 Ham. O, throw away the worser part of it. 
 And live the purer with the other half. 
 
 In the moment, Hamlet is almost worthy 
 of his father. His speeches to his 
 mother, after the departure of the Ghost, 
 show the Christian in the man ; the man- 
 ner in which he reasons for the Queen 
 shows that when he sins he sins not 
 through ignorance, for a closer grasp of 
 the ethics of repentance there could not 
 be. But he has fixed his thoughts on the 
 mere killing of Claudius, and a mind so 
 over-scrupulous, so delicate as his, shrinks, 
 after all is said, from murder, when he 
 must act, though he refuses to grasp 
 the high meaning of his mission. He 
 is not great enough, faithful enough, 
 simple enough to be Denmark saving 
 Denmark; he is only "I, Hamlet — I, 
 Hamlet the man." He will embark for 
 England with traitors and assassins rather 
 than act ; he will intrigue, meet craft 
 
44 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 with craft, rather than appeal to the peo- 
 ple, — a people to whom belief in spirits 
 is not foreign, — and, releasing Horatio 
 and Marcellus and Bernardo from their 
 oath, tell the whole truth to the Danes, 
 who already dislike Claudius and admire 
 the younger Hamlet. He distrusts the 
 people. His mother has failed him ; 
 Ophelia has been made the tool of her 
 father — frailty and woman — falsehood 
 and man ! He will trust only himself; 
 but he doubts all things, even himself. 
 He thinks of the bravery of Fortinbras, 
 moving on Claudius and Denmark with 
 all odds apparently against him, to restore 
 the honor of his name and country. " Ex- 
 amples gross as earth" exhort him. If 
 he would be royal, if he would be grandly 
 noble, if he could conceive for an instant 
 what his destiny should be, if he could 
 soar above the Ego, if his doubt did not 
 stand in the way of his desiring real hap- 
 piness and perfection, he would not work 
 the ruin of all about him ; for even Ho- 
 ratio's heart must be blasted by Hamlet's 
 failure. Doubt has blinded him ; he can- 
 not see beyond his small subjective world; 
 his mind is a kingdom in which he is a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 45 
 
 mere subject. He cannot be great and 
 he cannot be base. He cannot accept 
 the high and he will not unreservedly 
 accept the low. Heaven dazzles him and 
 hell affrights him, and he is too fine to be 
 content with earth. He knows now the 
 worst of the King and the Queen; he has 
 tested them, and the word of the Ghost is 
 corroborated, and yet he can only say, 
 after he has tried to reason himself into 
 fury : 
 
 O, from this time forth. 
 My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth ! 
 
 The voyage to England proves to him 
 that he must settle the matter with his 
 uncle finally or die. Conscience, speak- 
 ing to him who coupled hell with a 
 message that seemed to come from 
 heaven, has made him a coward ; but 
 now he can act as a man, for he must kill 
 Claudius in self-defence. He had cruelly 
 hoist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with 
 their own petard. Through him they 
 have gone to their death. Still he talks 
 about " conscience " ; he makes variations 
 on the "me" and "my." He has suffi- 
 cient cause and sufficient proof for ridding 
 
46 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Denmark of Claudius ; but he is still 
 uncertain, although he thus speaks of 
 Claudius : 
 
 Popp'd in between the election and my hopes. 
 
 Thrown out his angle for my proper life. 
 
 And with such cozenage — is't not perfect conscience. 
 
 To quit him with this arm ? and is 't not to be damn'd. 
 
 To let this canker of our nature come 
 
 In further evil ? 
 
 Horatio implies that the time is short ; 
 the opportunity must come soon, or 
 Claudius may strike foul. 
 
 Hamlet says : 
 
 It will be short : the interim is mine ; 
 
 And a man's life 's no- more than to say *' One.'* 
 
 Hamlet, weak as usual, though now he 
 knows what the mission of the Ghost was, 
 since he sees in Claudius " the canker of 
 our nature " and of Denmark, allows 
 himself to be trapped ; he is diverted from 
 his purpose : he dies, and his dynasty 
 dies with him. Fortinbras, who believes 
 and acts, enters triumphant, and the 
 mission of the Ghost fails, because he 
 who should have been a prince at heart 
 was a prince only in name. Doubting, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 47 
 
 he coupled hell with heaven and earth, 
 and so, like his nobler father, he died 
 unsatisfied, — happier, however, than the 
 elder Hamlet in one thing only : his last 
 message reached ears capable of under- 
 standing it. 
 
SOME PHASES OF SHAKE- 
 SPEAREAN INTERPRETATION 
 
SOME PHASES OF SHAKE- 
 SPEAREAN INTERPRETA- 
 TION 
 
 IT Is with much dissatisfaction that 
 a lover of Shakespeare reads the 
 various essays and volumes that pre- 
 tend to show what the poet's personal 
 religious faith or opinion really was. Ap- 
 parently such inquiry soon degenerates into 
 active and unreasonable partisanship, in 
 which desire and imagination twist facts 
 into all sorts of shapes. It is only neces- 
 sary to examine nearly every modern critic 
 of Shakespeare, including one of the latest, 
 George Brandes,^ to show that the partisan 
 is always behind the interpreter. Sir 
 William Fraser, generally well balanced, 
 loses his self-control, like the others, when 
 he touches the author of " Hamlet." Sir 
 William says, in " Hie et Ubique " :^ 
 
 ^ William Shakespeare : a Critical Study. London : 
 Wm. Heinemann. 
 
 2 New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
52 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 " Two scenes in Shakespeare I have always 
 regretted. I think that he transgresses in both 
 the limits of art in different ways; they are to 
 me most painful to read. The scene between 
 Arthur and Hubert, in 'King John,' and that 
 between Gloucester and Lady Anne, in ' Rich- 
 ard the Third.' I can hardly suppose that such 
 a scene as the latter can be true to nature. I 
 hope that it is unnatural." 
 
 So far Sir Willlam*s opinion is very good; 
 and though eminent men of letters who 
 assume to be psychologists tell us that 
 Lady Anne did just what might have been 
 expected of her, most of us doubtless have 
 more sympathy with Sir William's point 
 of view. Suddenly, not willing for a 
 moment that even a pebble should be 
 cast at the dramatist of his idolatry, he 
 begins to interpret. " Has," he asks, 
 " the idea suggested itself that this scene 
 was put in by the poet to gratify Elizabeth 
 by a reflection on her cousin and rival, 
 Mary of Scotland, as to her marriage with 
 the Duke of Orkney ? " 
 
 Taking everything into consideration, 
 this makes the judicious smihe, and Sir 
 William does the best he can, under the 
 circumstances, by putting the suggestion 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 53 
 
 in the form of a question. But it must 
 be admitted that some of the inferences of 
 Mr. Richard Simpson, of M. Rio, of Mr. 
 Wilkes, who take a brief for Shakespeare's 
 Catholicism, are as far-fetched as this 
 chance guess of Sir William Eraser's, or 
 as the elaborate apologies for his supposed 
 indifference to religion made by Vehse, 
 Laird, Kreysig, or Tyler. The researches 
 and opinions of the late Mr. Simpson are 
 edited by Henry Sebastian Bowden, of 
 the Oratory. " The Religion of Shake- 
 speare " ^ is a valuable and interesting 
 book, apart from what its author tries to 
 prove, and to persons who have already 
 made up their minds that all the greatest 
 actors in the world's history were of the 
 one Faith, either by anticipation or par- 
 ticipation, it will be delightfully edifying 
 and perennially refreshing. For there 
 can be nothing more permanently agree- 
 able than to find one's preferences cor- 
 roborated in a well-printed, well-bound 
 book. The defect in Mr. Simpson's 
 " Religion of Shakespeare," which Father 
 
 ^ The Religion of Shakespeare : Chiefly from the 
 Writings of the late Richard Simpson, M. A. London : 
 Burns & Oates. 
 
54 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Bowden has carefully revised, lies in the 
 thesis that either the Catholic Church or 
 the Protestant opinion makes or unmakes 
 a poet, or that either or any other religion 
 " gives birth to a poet." " The Reformed 
 creed was/' Father Bowden says, " we 
 think, from its negative and materialistic 
 tendency, unfitted to give birth to a poet." 
 And then he quotes Mr. Matthew Ar- 
 nold : " Catholicism, from its antiquity, 
 its pretensions to universality, from its 
 really widespread prevalence, from its 
 sensuousness, has something European, 
 august, and imaginative; Protestantism 
 presents, from its inferiority in all these 
 respects, something provincial, mean, and 
 prosaic." It is not hard to admit this, 
 nor is it hard to make manifest that the 
 synthesizing power of CathoHcity has 
 gathered all that is beautiful and splendid 
 about it ; it is needless to express what is 
 so evident. The austere creed of Calvin 
 cut away from the splendor and beauty even 
 of the Bible it professed to idolize. But 
 human nature and tradition and genius have 
 been too strong for artificial bonds, even 
 for that false asceticism which occasionally 
 shows itself among modern Catholics. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 55 
 
 It is assumed, too, by many of the 
 opposing interpreters of Shakespeare, that 
 he was everything but a poet, although 
 they pretend great reverence for him 
 under this title ; in reality, however, they 
 strain every nerve to prove that he was 
 a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, 
 a conscious psychologist, a doctor of laws 
 in everything but title, a politician, a hater 
 of the existing form of government, a con- 
 spirator against it in words, a devout and 
 lettered theologian, a reformer, an accom- 
 plished courtier, and a hundred other 
 things ; when, after all, he was something 
 at least as great as all these fine attributes 
 of man, — a poet. In spite of all protes- 
 tations to the contrary, it is becoming 
 more and more evident to the students 
 of Shakespearean criticism that the syn- 
 thetical, inexplicable, divine poetic gift 
 that made Shakespeare what he was is the 
 one factor which most of the learned 
 gentlemen — including Father Bowden, 
 Professor Furnivall, Herr Vehse — dim 
 somewhat in analyzing the lesser qual- 
 ities. He is in love with truth and 
 beauty, like all poets ; and the higher the 
 quality of the poet, the more he is in love 
 
56 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 with truth and beauty. Writers like 
 Father Bowden, Mr. Simpson, and cer- 
 tainly most of the men who make Shake- 
 speare's genius depend on his religion, 
 seem unwilling to leave much to God. 
 They do not realize that what we call 
 genius is beyond all explanation ; but 
 their reading of great poets, particularly 
 of this great poet, ought to have taught 
 them that the more universal a poet is, 
 the easier it is for lesser minds to put 
 what they like into his works. And they 
 seem to forget, too, that history seen from 
 the modern point of view is an illusion, 
 so far as it may be supposed to be a guide 
 to the meaning of the past. This is less 
 true of Father Bowden than of most 
 others ; but sometimes he appears to lose 
 sight of the difference in the attitude of 
 Catholics before the Council of Trent and 
 their attitude to-day. It is a truism to 
 say that St. Thomas, in the spirit of the 
 Church, made the great synthesis. And 
 yet many of us who accept this as a fact 
 beyond argument talk and write as if 
 the essences he fixed, and which perme- 
 ate all that is best in art and literature, 
 were invented by him. Similarly we find 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 57 
 
 Father Bowden and Mr. Simpson noting 
 elementary moral truths uttered by Shake- 
 speare, which were acknowledged by pa- 
 gans as well as Christians, and which are 
 as evident in Homer as in Dante, as quasi 
 protests against the doctrines of the Ref- 
 ormation. In the first chapter of "The 
 Religion of Shakespeare," for instance, 
 Father Bowden declares that the leading 
 idea in the famous lines in " As You Like 
 It" — 
 
 Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything — 
 
 " is in its very essence opposed to the 
 fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, 
 as we have already shown." Father Bow- 
 den has already said : 
 
 " There are, broadly speaking, two views of 
 nature, — the Catholic and the Protestant. 
 What may be the Protestant view at the pres- 
 ent day is perhaps difficult to determine, for 
 Protestantism is fluctuating and manifold. But 
 the Protestantism of Shakespeare's day was 
 clearly defined. Nature was a synonym for 
 discord. Man through his fall was in essential 
 discord with God ; the lower world was in dis- 
 cord with man. The Redemption had brought 
 
58 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 no true healing of this rupture ; for salvation 
 was wrought not by internal restoration, but by 
 mere outward acceptance. Saint and sinner 
 were intrinsically alike. In saint as in sinner 
 there was, to use the words of a reformed con- 
 fession of faith, ' an intimate, profound, inscrut- 
 able, and irreparable corruption of the entire 
 nature^ and of all the powers, especially of the 
 superior and principal powers of the soul.' . . . 
 The mind of man has grown darkened ; he can- 
 not see in creatures the beauty of Him that made 
 them. The will of man has grown hardened ; 
 he cannot see in creatures the beauty and good- 
 ness of the Lord. Creatures can teach man 
 no moral lesson, for man is no longer a moral 
 being. His freedom of will has left him; his 
 instincts are all towards vice. Nature can only 
 find food for his passions and minister to the 
 vices of his fallen state." ^ 
 
 Now, there can be no question that 
 Shakespeare was out of sympathy with 
 this gloomy doctrine ; but that it repre- 
 sented the spirit of the Elizabethan re- 
 form, or that it was held by anybody in 
 England, except the Puritans, is doubtful. 
 At any rate, it was not exposed in the 
 poetry of Wyatt, of Sidney, of Spenser, 
 
 * The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 12, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 59 
 
 and they were certainly Protestants in the 
 Elizabethan sense of the word. Nothing 
 can be more opposed to it than the senti- 
 ment of the splendid " Epithalamium " of 
 Spenser. The Duke senior*s speech, in 
 " As You Like It," might have been 
 uttered by Horace or Theocritus, voicing 
 the better paganism, — only we should 
 have, perhaps, to re-define the word 
 " good." Adding illustrations, Father 
 Bowden quotes as against the revised 
 Protestantism of the times : 
 
 Their lips were four red roses on a stalk, 
 
 Which in their summer beauty kissed each other. ^ 
 
 This is quite as much pagan as Catholic, 
 — in fact, our early Christian ancestors 
 borrowed the symbolic rose from the 
 pagans, and Milton, Puritan of the Puri- 
 tans, might have used this metaphor with- 
 out being reasonably accused of leaning 
 towards the Pope. In " Cymbeline " 
 Guiderius says : 
 
 For notes of sorrow out of tune are worse 
 Than priests and fanes that lie. 
 
 1 Richard III, Act IV, Sc. 3. 
 
6o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 And this, humanely speaking, is very fine 
 and impassioned. But Father Bowden 
 seriously adds : 
 
 ^' It is impossible to suppose that Shakespeare 
 really held that the singing of a Miserere a trifle 
 too sharp was worse than a hypocritical priest- 
 hood and a false religion. Read ironically, the 
 text means, ' You talk of the lying priests and 
 their lying temples ; I hold your vile psalm- 
 singing to be ten times worse.' " ^ 
 
 Observe the effect of searching through 
 the most vital of poets, note-book in 
 hand, to prove a cause. It means chronic 
 Philistinism. If Shakespeare wrote that 
 very human and exaggerated and pathetic 
 and sweet speech of Guiderius to be 
 " read ironically," he deserves to be de- 
 prived of the honor of having written it. 
 He wrote it as a poet, not as a polemist ; 
 he had no thought of the Miserere, but 
 only of a strain, nameless, full of grief and 
 longing. One might as well read into 
 Ophelia's artless speech to the Queen 
 Mother all sorts of insults to Queen 
 Elizabeth, or into Laertes' defiance of 
 
 1 Page 370. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 6i 
 
 the priest an attack on the Catholic rules 
 of Church discipline in England. In a 
 word, Shakespeare was a poet, and of his 
 time, which was not a Lutheran, Calvinis- 
 tic, or Puritan time at all, whatever the 
 Lutherans in their confession of faith 
 may have said. But both Father Bow- 
 den and Mr. Simpson will have it that 
 Shakespeare was the one Catholic poetic 
 dramatist in a time permeated with gen- 
 eral philosophic and popular opposition 
 to Catholic teaching, and hence these 
 strange and stretched extensions of poetry 
 to fit the bed of prose. Not so very- 
 long ago, when it was announced that the 
 last words Lord Tennyson had read on 
 his death-bed were those of the spoken 
 duo between Guiderius and Arviragus, 
 some of us regretted that they were not 
 those of the " Miserere ** or " Dies Irae," 
 and felt that the greatest lyrist of our cen- 
 tury had died as a poet rather than as a 
 Christian. But when it suits our pur- 
 pose, we insinuate that Guiderius had the 
 song of faith in his breast when what he 
 had in his mind, on his lips, was the 
 beautiful chant, as much pagan as Chris- 
 tian, but not rejected of Christianity : 
 
62 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Gui. Fear no more the heat o' the sun. 
 
 Nor the furious winter's rages ; 
 
 Thou thy worldly task hast done. 
 
 Home art gone and ta'en thy wages; 
 Golden lads and girls all must. 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
 
 Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
 Arv. Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; 
 
 Gut. Fear not slander, censure rash; 
 Arv. Thou hast finish' d joy and moan : 
 Both. All lovers young, all lovers must 
 
 Consign to thee and come to dust. 
 
 I trust that the readers of this article 
 will understand that I am entirely in sym- 
 pathy with the authors of " The Religion 
 of Shakespeare'* in their belief that the 
 Thomist philosophy permeates Shake- 
 speare's plays and sonnets. The poet was 
 the result of previous years and the in- 
 terpreter of inherited philosophy and 
 ethics ; and the results of Christian phi- 
 losophy and ethics could not be driven 
 from Elizabethan or Jacobean schools, 
 homes, and churches by acts of Parlia- 
 ment. They were of the essential life of 
 the people, and they are of the essential 
 life of the people still, as the study of 
 contemporary English literature will show. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 63 
 
 The poet or the novelist to-day — the 
 publicist, in fact, governed by English 
 traditions — accepts the same system of 
 ethics, derived from the teaching of the 
 Church, as Shakespeare used for a ground- 
 work to his marvels. The ethics of 
 Shakespeare are the ethics of Tennyson ; 
 and Swinburne and Thomas Hardy ac- 
 knowledge their existence by revolting 
 from them. The mistake that modern 
 writers. Catholic and non-Catholic, make 
 is in fancying that the influence of the 
 philosophy and ethics wrought into the 
 very tissue of national life by the Church 
 could be destroyed by the political defi- 
 ance of Henry VIII, or even by years of 
 Erastianism. The sacramental ideal has 
 lived in the hearts of the English people 
 like the vital germ in the wheat grains 
 found in the Egyptian mummy cases. 
 Concerning Shakespeare it must be re- 
 membered that he, as a dramatist, ap- 
 pealed directly to the people ; he was 
 dependent on the favor of the people. 
 If his audience had found " Hamlet " 
 dull, or " Measure for Measure " alien to 
 their ideas of morality, all the genius of 
 the author and all the talent of the actors 
 
64 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 at the Globe would not have saved it. 
 But we find that no dramatic author of 
 the later Elizabethan and earlier Jacobean 
 time was more popular than Shakespeare. 
 How does Father Bowden reconcile this 
 fact with the statement that he was not of 
 his time ? If any man must be of his 
 time, it is the dramatic author, who is 
 never the master, but always, more or 
 less, the slave of his public. Again, it 
 must be remembered that the party of 
 reform — in the sense in which Father 
 Bowden defines the word — did not fre- 
 quent the theatres. If Shakespeare had, 
 being a Cathohc at heart, written plays 
 against the sentiment of those who ac- 
 claimed him, he would not have been able 
 to build New Place or to assume his 
 arms at Stratford as a country gentle- 
 man. 
 
 One of the surprising tenets of the 
 school of critics to which Father Bowden, 
 and so many others who draw deductions 
 from Shakespeare absolutely opposed to 
 his, belong, is that every man who writes 
 must borrow a great thought directly from 
 some other man. As if great thoughts 
 were not in the air, as if the receptive 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 65 
 
 and comprehensive mind did not live 
 daily by assimilating noble things that 
 are like flashes from the facets of the 
 truth. Father Bowden makes a strong 
 point against the methods of his own 
 school of interpretation when he re- 
 marks : 
 
 " Does Hamlet say that there is nothing 
 good or evil [in the physical order] but thinking 
 makes so ? This idea is borrowed from the 
 pantheist Giordano Bruno, who was in London 
 from 1583 to 1586, just after Shakespeare's 
 arrival there, and who denied the existence [in 
 the moral order] of either absolute good or evil. 
 Again, Hamlet's praise of Horatio's equanim- 
 ity, which ' takes buffets and rewards with 
 equal thanks,' proves Shakespeare a stoic. The 
 poet's desire for the immortality of his verse in 
 praise of his beloved indicates his disbelief in 
 the immortality of the soul. His phrase ' the 
 prophetic soul of the world ' proves his pan- 
 theism, and the duty of meeting necessities as 
 necessities clearly shows his determinism." ^ 
 
 As a dramatist at the moment of the 
 whitest heat of the imagination, Shake- 
 speare does not represent himself or his 
 belief in the utterances of his characters. 
 
 ^ The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 20. 
 5 
 
66 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Hamlet, in his " damned, vacillating 
 state," ^ was a pantheist and almost every- 
 thing by turns, and Horatio says : " I 
 am more an antique Roman than a 
 Dane." 
 
 When Father Bowden insists in guar- 
 anteeing Shakespeare's orthodoxy by the 
 speeches of his creatures, or fails to see 
 that it is only the existence of the solid 
 but generally unexpressed dogmas behind 
 them in the author's mind that make the 
 never-absent contrast of the eternal with 
 the evanescent, he becomes as unconvinc- 
 ing as Professor Dowden and Herr Vehse 
 are when they draw their inferences. 
 Commenting on Shakespeare's — 
 
 So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men. 
 And Death once dead, there 's no more dying then, 
 
 Furnivall says : " This dramatic voice, of 
 course, does not always speak his own 
 beliefs, yet such is his ' saturation with 
 the Bible story,' so thoroughly does it 
 ' seem as much part of him as his love of 
 nature and music, bubbling out of him at 
 every turn,* that I, with some reluctance, 
 
 1 Tennyson's " Supposed Confessions of a Second- 
 rate Sensitive Mind." 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 67 
 
 conclude that he held, in the main, the 
 orthodox layman's belief of his day." ^ 
 
 But the orthodox belief of the day was 
 not Puritanism or Calvinism or Luther- 
 anism, as Father Bowden would have us 
 believe. What it was — what it could 
 not help being, when we recall the fact 
 that the mind and the temperament of 
 men have never been changed in a few 
 years, except by a miracle — is 5hown by 
 evidence of Shakespeare's plays and son- 
 nets ; it is shown by the undercurrent 
 in Spenser and Sidney. Says Professor 
 Halleck:^ 
 
 " Shakespeare was extremely fortunate in 
 having parents who could neither read nor 
 write ; we can, therefore, be safe in assuming 
 that the greater part of whatever information his 
 parents had, came from the exercise of their own 
 senses in the experience of life. Their senses 
 would be the keener because they could not 
 rely on books. . . . Herein lies the reason why 
 Shakespeare was fortunate in having intelligent 
 parents who were not bookish. By force of 
 example they taught him to rely largely on his 
 senses for information." 
 
 1 Preface to Leopold edition. 
 
 2 The Education of the Central Nervous System, 
 p. 182. 
 
68 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 And, with acute senses and an imagination 
 exquisitely susceptible, no human crea- 
 ture born and reared in Warwickshire 
 could fail to accept the evidences of joy in 
 life. Rural England taught the old faith 
 at every turn, as it does in Oxford to-day, 
 as it does in Stratford to-day. The re- 
 form was a bookish thing, though it was 
 not very much helped by the knowledge 
 the young Elizabethans gathered from the 
 Catechism, the Psalter, the Book of Com- 
 mon Prayer, or the Small Catechism. 
 Ritualism, reaction against barrenness of 
 worship, must always exist in a country 
 where the Gothic spire and the ruined 
 monastery and the legend of the Sacra- 
 mental Presence are everywhere. And 
 all the beauty of the " ruined choirs " and 
 the hidden God were very near to the boy 
 Shakespeare and other boys who were not 
 sodden or perverted. 
 
 But no ; everything must be drawn 
 from books ! Shakespeare must have 
 studied scholastic philosophy ; he must 
 have read St. Thomas, or Giordano Bruno, 
 or St. Augustine, or Lucretius, or Dante, 
 or Lorenzo Valla. Nothing whatever is 
 left to that power of knowing the false 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 69 
 
 from the true, that faculty of assimilating 
 the beautiful, that quality of expressing it 
 beautifully, which is the gift of God to the 
 poet, and which makes him different from 
 other men. Ethics that are as old as 
 Homer, truths common to all men, — 
 though sometimes blurred, — which have 
 been the salt of the world since Cain broke 
 the unwritten law against murder, flashes 
 of poetic fire that illumined Isaiah, are at- 
 tributed to Christian authors, as if Christ 
 had come, not to fulfil, but to invent. Let 
 us remark that St. Thomas prefers, in one 
 noble passage on the joys of contempla- 
 tion, to invoke the authority of Aristotle : 
 " Comme s'il voulait indiquer les origines 
 philosophiques de sa doctrine, et le lien 
 qui la rattache en morale comme en meta- 
 physique a la tradition peripateticienne." ^ 
 Now, in " The Religion of Shake- 
 speare,'' and similar books by partisans, 
 the example of St. Thomas is ignored. 
 There seems to be the underlying infer- 
 ence that philosophy was discovered by 
 St. Paul, and poetry began with St. Peter. 
 This view narrows and cramps us ; at 
 
 1 Philosophic de St. Thomas d'Aquin, par Charles 
 Jourdain. 
 
70 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 best, it irritates the scholar, and makes 
 the student, bHnded for the moment, 
 when he can remove the hood from his 
 eyes, accuse us of clouding the truth. 
 That rehgion builds upon the natural 
 cannot be lost sight of without killing 
 the vital quality in him that teaches. 
 
 In discussing " Measure for Measure," 
 by far the noblest of all tragi-comedies. 
 Father Bowden, who so acknowledges, 
 talks a great deal about the " teaching " 
 of Shakespeare : he is a casuist, in the 
 best sense ; he understands that the truth 
 must not always be told ; he rejects the 
 principles of Protestantism that "each 
 man is the sole interpreter of the moral 
 law, as of revealed doctrine, and human 
 engagements are supreme, the oath or 
 word must be kept at any cost " ; he 
 accepts the lawfulness of " the use of 
 equivocation when the truth is unjustly 
 demanded." Says the Duke, in " Meas- 
 ure for Measure" : 
 
 Pay with falsehood false exacting. 
 
 According to Father Bowden's inter- 
 pretation, it is remarkable that in this 
 matter " he should be asain found in 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 71 
 
 defending the unpopular and Catholic 
 side." We all know the plot of " Meas- 
 ure for Measure," and we know the trick 
 by which Isabella saves herself, — a kind 
 of theatrical trick as common in sixteenth- 
 century comedy as the long-lost-brother 
 incident was in the melodrama of the 
 earlier nineteenth. The Duke advises 
 it ; but on the stage an act which needs 
 defence must always be defended in accord- 
 ance with the sympathy of the auditors. 
 As to the action of the Duke himself, it 
 can only be excused, even as a dramatic 
 expedient, by quoting the sophism that 
 " the end justifies the means." The 
 Duke, as we all remember, masquerades 
 as Friar Lodowick, and in his last speech 
 he says of Mariana : 
 
 Love her, Angelo : 
 I have confessed her, and I know her virtue. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how this 
 sort of "teaching" can be turned to 
 account by the most violent partisan of 
 Shakespeare's didacticism. But probably 
 Father Bowden does not include the as- 
 sumption by the Duke of sacerdotal power 
 when he says : 
 
72 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 "That is, the truth and fidelity we owe to 
 some, may be at times only discharged by veil- 
 ing truth to others. This is so, of course, as 
 regards the professional secrets of lawyers, physi- 
 cians, priests ; but though recognized and acted 
 on in practice, the theory of equivocation was 
 denounced in Shakespeare's time as Jesuitical 
 and vile, as much as it is now." ^ 
 
 But if we are to hold men who wrote 
 for the theatre responsible for the intrigues 
 on which they hung their dramatic action ; 
 if we are to read profound meanings in 
 time-worn stage tricks, what becomes of 
 the "teaching" of Calderon and Lope de 
 Vega, of whose practical adherence to the 
 faith there can be no doubt? Both these 
 great Spanish playwriters used situations 
 which, taken seriously and with their in- 
 tentions not kept in view, are, to say the 
 least, offensive to pious ears. The dram- 
 atists of the romantic period took the 
 material that lay near them, material that 
 had become traditional in many cases. In 
 " As You Like It," for instance, the palm 
 tree and the threatening serpent, not found 
 in English forests, are mere " properties," 
 as the sudden conversion of Orlando's 
 
 1 Page 37. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 73 
 
 wicked brother is a stage convention. 
 Your true romanticist does not trouble 
 himself about facts ; he uses them, as 
 an artist uses pigments, for their artistic 
 values. Schiller makes Elizabeth and 
 Mary Stuart meet, to the end that a great 
 dramatic effect may be produced, though 
 there is no record of such a meeting. And 
 Sir Walter Scott's love for romantic effects 
 leads him to invent passages in the lives 
 of the great which are not found in accu- 
 rate chronicles. Sir Walter, like Shake- 
 speare, has always the ethical background, 
 but his characters cannot usually be quoted 
 as representing himself or the morality 
 which he revered and practised. 
 Imogen, in " Cymbeline," says: 
 
 If I do lie and do 
 No harm by it, though the gods hear, I hope 
 They 'II pardon it. 
 
 Pisanio thinks : 
 
 Thou bidd'st me to my loss ; for true to thee 
 Were to prove false, which I will never be. 
 To him that is most true. 
 
 And, later : 
 
 Wherein I am false I am honest ; not true, to be true. 
 
74 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 George Brandes, whose method of in- 
 terpretation is similar to Father Bowden's, 
 draws from " Cymbeline " — which they 
 both admire, ahnost revere — this infer- 
 ence, having quoted the lines of Pisanio : 
 
 " That is to say, he lies and deceives because 
 he cannot help it ; but his character is none the 
 worse — nay, all the better — on that account. 
 He disobeys his master, and thereby merits his 
 gratitude; he hoodwinks Cloten, and therein he 
 does well." ^ 
 
 Nowhere in Shakespeare^s plays do we 
 find a character bereft of free will, for 
 even his fools have the power to choose 
 between good and evil ; and if we take 
 Autolycus, Shakespeare's chief rascal in 
 "A Winter's Tale," as a fair example, we 
 do not find that character is improved by 
 deceit. 
 
 " Imogen," Mr. Simpson tells us,^ "is 
 the ideal of fidelity, and of religious 
 fidelity, — to be deceived neither by the 
 foreign impostor who comes to her in 
 her husband's name, nor by the en- 
 nobled clown who offers himself under 
 
 1 William Shakespeare : a Critical Study, by Brandes, 
 p. 338, vol. ii. 
 
 ^ The Religion of Shakespeare, p. 369. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 75 
 
 the Queen's protection." Now, listen to 
 George Brandes's view of " Cymbeline," 
 and you will observe that Father Bowden, 
 Mr. Simpson, and George Brandes are 
 bound to put Shakespeare in the right, no 
 matter what he does. Mr. Brandes con- 
 tinues, a propos of Pisanio : 
 
 " In the same way all the nobler characters 
 fly in the face of accepted moral laws. Imogen 
 disobeys her father and braves his wrath and 
 even his curse, because she will not renounce 
 the husband of her choice. So, too, she after- 
 wards deceives the young man in the forest by 
 appearing in male attire and under an assumed 
 name — untruthfully, and yet with a higher 
 truth, calling herself Fidele, the faithful one. 
 So, too, the upright Belarius robs the King of 
 both his sons, but thereby saves them for him 
 and for the country ; and during their whole 
 boyhood he puts them off for their own good, 
 with false accounts of things. So, too, the 
 honest physician deceives the Queen, whose 
 wickedness he has divined, by giving her an 
 opiate in place of a poison, and thereby baffling 
 her attempt at murder. So, too, Guiderius acts 
 rightly by taking the law into his own hand by 
 answering Cloten's insults by killing him at 
 sight and cutting off his head. He thus, with- 
 out knowing it, prevents the brutish idiot's in- 
 tended violence to Imogen." 
 
76 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 It must be evident that the conduct 
 of life, in these principles and practices, 
 would be disastrous. But Shakespeare, 
 writing for the theatre, strung his effects 
 of character and situation on these cross 
 purposes, which it is absurd to take seri- 
 ously. Why not say frankly that Imogen, 
 like most people, Christian or pagan, in 
 a difficulty, was tempted to tell a falsehood, 
 and she hoped that " the gods " might 
 look upon it as a " white lie," as she in- 
 tended to do no harm by it. What had 
 Shakespeare, in the heat of imagination, to 
 do with the " doctrine of equivocation " ? 
 As Imogen had a good intention, the 
 result seemed to justify it, and it helped 
 the plot of the play. We may be quite 
 sure that the Elizabethans did not worry 
 themselves, as they listened, about the 
 theory by which Mr. Simpson would per- 
 haps excuse it. Similarly, " the ethics of 
 intention," of which George Brandes talks, 
 would have doomed Guiderius, in the 
 eyes of the audience, had his kilHng of 
 Cloten not been necessary to the plot of 
 " Cymbeline." 
 
 The critic who would make sermons 
 out of songs is becoming a weariness to 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 77 
 
 those who know that the great poet is 
 seldom a conscious preacher, while the 
 great preacher is very often a poet. That 
 Shakespeare's dramas are permeated with 
 Christian ethics and with the philosophy 
 of Christianity, there can be no doubt. It 
 could not have been otherwise, for these 
 were his inheritance, and he was too fine 
 to reject them. They were his inherit- 
 ance as they have been the inheritance of 
 Sir Walter Scott and Tennyson, Thack- 
 eray and Longfellow ; but he was nearer 
 the source. And he, having God-given 
 genius of the highest order, turned, by 
 virtue of that gift, to the light, as all great 
 poets have done in their highest moments. 
 That he represented the majority of his 
 countrymen we know, since four-fifths of 
 the English nation were Catholic at heart. 
 As to his personal belief, it is plain, from 
 the number of repetitions of the same eth- 
 ical formulae on the lips of certain char- 
 acters, — who are, first of all, human and 
 dramatic, — that he was the child of the 
 Church, whose ethical traditions the Eng- 
 lish of to-day accept without acknowledg- 
 ing such acceptance. As to his practice, 
 who of us can judge of what was demanded 
 
78 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 of the Catholic in the time of EHzabeth ? 
 Puritanism, gaining ground, thrust his 
 dramas from the stage/ " It was a fanat- 
 icism which had found its way into his own 
 home," writes George Brandes. Stratford 
 was a stronghold of Puritanism. His wife 
 and daughters, Susannah and Judith, were 
 of the sect. "Judith," Brandes adds, 
 " was as ignorant as a child. Thus he 
 [Shakespeare] must pay the penalty of his 
 long absence from home and his utter 
 neglect of the education of his girls." 
 
 And this may help to explain the loss 
 of all domestic records which, had Shake- 
 speare's daughters not been ignorant, might 
 have solved some of the questions that 
 now force the professional interpreters to 
 draw upon their inner consciousness. 
 
 1 Page 391. 
 
SOME PEDAGOGICAL USES OF 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
SOME PEDAGOGICAL USES 
 OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 THE use of the works of Shake- 
 speare in schools and colleges is 
 general. No school of impor- 
 tance in the United States omits the study 
 of the plays from its curriculum, and the 
 entrance examinations for admittance to 
 the colleges always include questions 
 concerning the sources, history, and 
 development of these masterpieces. An 
 examination of the courses in nineteen 
 representative colleges or universities — 
 these names seem in most cases to be 
 valued as interchangeable — shows that 
 Shakespeare is analyzed as carefully and 
 interpreted as reverently as Dante is 
 analyzed and taught in the schools of 
 Italy. In England neither Oxford nor 
 Cambridge neglects him, and in France a 
 great change has taken place since Vol- 
 taire sneered at him ; for very recently 
 M. Jules-Claretie dared to put the names 
 
82 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 of Moliere and Shakespeare together and 
 to bind them with an exaggerated phrase 
 from the elder Dumas, - — " Shakespeare 
 was the greatest of creators, except 
 God." 
 
 The plays of this masterly interpreter 
 long ago found their way into the gram- 
 mar schools, and gradually they are get- 
 ting into the primary schools. Teachers 
 of experience, who are either the best or 
 the worst specialists in the child mind, 
 are divided as to the time when Shake- 
 speare shall be introduced into the lower 
 schools. But those whose experience has 
 not hardened them are in favor of intro- 
 ducing good literature as soon as possible, 
 and they fortify themselves with some 
 reasons ; and one of the best of these 
 reasons is that fine taste in literature can- 
 not be too early formed. Another reason, 
 almost as good, is that the imagination, 
 that faculty of the soul most neglected in 
 education, should be directed and culti- 
 vated. We are cultivating the power of 
 observation, more or less intelligently, by 
 means of the " object lesson." We, how- 
 ever, are by no means in advance of that 
 utilitarian school which Miss Edgeworth, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 83 
 
 Madame de Genlis, and Mrs. Barbauld 
 represented over a hundred years ago. 
 Not that we should esteem it an honor to 
 be " advanced," but to have attained the 
 best, whether the best have been reached 
 before or not. Those who can recall 
 Mrs. Barbauld's " Evenings at Home," 
 in which the justly esteemed conversation 
 called ** Eyes and No Eyes" occurs, and 
 Mrs. Marcet's " Tales of Political Econ- 
 omy," are quite willing to accept the 
 practical conclusions that come from 
 Hoifding's assertion, that "everywhere 
 where there is development, later events 
 are conditioned by earlier"^; or with 
 Professor Halleck's, that " if brain cells 
 are allowed to pass the plastic stage with- 
 out being subjected to the proper stimuli 
 or training, they will never fully develop." 
 Everybody, whether a student of the 
 child mind or not, will go further with 
 Mr. Halleck, and agree that " the majority 
 of adults have many undeveloped spots 
 in their brains." There is a tendency on 
 the part of the educated theorist to attrib- 
 ute nearly all the undeveloped spots to 
 
 1 The Education of the Central Nervous System, by 
 Reuben Post Halleck. The Macmillan Company. 
 
84 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 the lack of practice of the faculty of 
 observation. Many of these undeveloped 
 spots are doubtless due to the lack of 
 practice because of the lack of opportunity 
 for practice. Shakespeare's marigold and 
 Wordsworth's primrose are of no mental 
 stimulating value to a man who has never 
 seen either the English flowers or those 
 which we approximate to them in our 
 country. On the other hand, the Philis- 
 tine by the river's brim who sees only the 
 primrose as a golden-yellow flower, with 
 kidney-shaped leaves and a calyx of five 
 to nine petal-like sepals, growing in the 
 marsh or by the river, does not think with 
 aglow of Shakespeare's Mary-buds: 
 
 Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings. 
 
 And Phoebus 'gins arise. 
 His steeds to water at those springs 
 
 On chaliced flowers that lies; 
 And winking Mary-buds begin 
 
 To ope their golden eyes : 
 With everything that pretty is. 
 
 The difference, after all, between the 
 average man, capable of enjoying only 
 what he sees, — Matthew Arnold's 
 " homme moyen sensuel," — and the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 85 
 
 man who enjoys intensely what he does 
 not see with his physical eyes, is not in 
 the lack of training of the power of 
 observation, but in the training of the 
 power of imagination. Observation alone 
 cannot make a poet, — though later, 
 Shakespeare and Tennyson owed much 
 to the faculty of seeing keenly, — nor can 
 it make the man of science, who becomes 
 great in proportion to his unconscious 
 skill in the management of what we call 
 imagination. 
 
 The purpose of this essay is not to 
 make a plea for the cultivation of this 
 faculty by teachers ; for in the breaking 
 up of various pedagogical systems, experi- 
 mental and empirical, the experienced 
 teacher has learned the need of it, though 
 even in religious schools, where the sym- 
 bols of Christianity are constant stimuli 
 to the imagination, teachers are not always 
 sufficiently alert to apply the psychological 
 processes of the Church to the develop- 
 ment, the free development, of the soul. 
 The purpose of this essay is to consider 
 the means of carrying the study of the 
 best and most subtle works of Shake- 
 speare through all the courses of school 
 
86 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 and college and university, in the Ameri- 
 can sense of the terms, and to give reasons 
 why this should be done. 
 
 It is the business of education to de- 
 velop all the faculties of the soul, " the 
 soul being, in some sense, everything." 
 The limitations of this business are due, 
 as a rule, to the gradual atrophy of the 
 perception of the teacher who fancies that 
 he has reached conclusions where he has 
 only attained a condition of growth ar- 
 rested; who seizes theories the seeming 
 novelty of which offers an apparent support 
 to his paralyzed hands. The develop- 
 ment of the imagination applied to spirit- 
 ual things is common in religious schools, 
 for the symbols that show the relations of 
 the natural and supernatural are every- 
 where. The sense of sight receives the 
 impression of the suffering figure on the 
 cross, common sense centralizes it, and 
 the imagination, trained religiously, con- 
 serves, colors, treasures, systematizes the 
 impression. Thus the spiritual sense is 
 cultivated day by day, hour by hour, and 
 all the faculties of the soul are directed 
 toward a fuller richness of faith. There is 
 no play of fancy about these object lessons, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 87 
 
 they appeal to no intermediate quality be- 
 tween the imagination and the judgment 
 — they satisfy both. 
 
 It is often a matter of wonder that 
 many persons who have what we call 
 " the spiritual sense " highly cultivated 
 have little perception of the beauties of 
 music, art, literature, or architecture, ex- 
 cept when these arts are directly appHed 
 to the service of religion. Conversely, we 
 have even a greater number whose per- 
 ception of beauty in nature or art is 
 blunted the moment nature and art are 
 taken into the service of religion ; they 
 have neither the gift of faith nor has the 
 spiritual sense been cultivated. That one 
 may exist without the other, experience 
 abundantly shows. 
 
 Let it be admitted that one of the duties 
 of the teacher is to cultivate and direct 
 the imagination, and it ought to follow 
 that he cannot begin too soon. It fol- 
 lows, too, that he ought to put within the 
 reach of the pupil such literature as will 
 lay the foundation of taste and culture at 
 the earliest possible moment. It would 
 be folly to attempt to teach philosophy 
 to the very young, because the study of 
 
88 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 philosophy demands qualities that are lack- 
 ing in the minds of the very young ; but the 
 cultivation of taste and the enriching of 
 the imagination have nothing to do with 
 exact definitions and analyses and carefully 
 distinguished processes. What literature 
 is best for the young whose taste and 
 power of conserving beautiful impressions 
 are to be educated ? The sort of food 
 offered to the children in the shape of 
 little stories and articles that are literary 
 prolongations of the odious patois called 
 " baby talk," which must make the most 
 intelligent infant hate his species at the 
 very moment he enters life ; the at- 
 tempts in letters of the atrophied adult 
 mind to bring itself to the level of the 
 child mind with the dew of God's morn- 
 ing upon it ? By no means. The child 
 should be prepared to accept the master- 
 pieces. The child lives in his own world. 
 His senses seem miraculously keen until 
 he begins to believe that all lessons should 
 be learned through books, and then the 
 fatal art of printing is set up as a screen 
 between him and the wonders of the 
 world God has given him. One can no 
 more hear Shakespeare without seeing the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 89 
 
 unspoiled imagination of the Stratford boy 
 than one can read St. John without feeling 
 that the sunsets of Patmos were finer than 
 any known in western skies, — at least 
 they were finer to him, whose imagination 
 irradiated his observation. 
 
 The value of the exercise of the faculty 
 of observation, and of the process by 
 which the imagination stores impressions, 
 is nowhere more evident than in Shake- 
 speare's plays. In "The Education of 
 the Central Nervous System," a book 
 of great value to teachers, Mr. Halleck 
 says : 
 
 " Every one ought to know how Shake- 
 speare's senses were trained ; for in his sensory 
 experience is to be found the formation of all 
 those imperishable structures given to humanity 
 by his heaven-climbing genius. 
 
 "Two things are true of Shakespeare, — his 
 senses had magnificent training; the stimuli of 
 nature also had in him a wonderful central ner- 
 vous system to develop. We shall not reach 
 his heights, but if we have the proper training 
 we shall ascend far higher than we could with- 
 out it. If John Weakling can never make a 
 Samson, that is no reason why John should not 
 take proper gymnastic exercise, and develop his 
 latent powers to the utmost. At their best they 
 
90 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 may be poor; at their worst they may keep him 
 through life the slave of underlings. After go- 
 ing through sensory training similar to Shake- 
 speare's, any boy would be better fitted to cope 
 with the world." ^ 
 
 Mr. Halleck elaborates this passage by- 
 many quoted extracts from Shakespeare's 
 plays. Warwickshire is always present in 
 the plays, for Shakespeare never gets out- 
 side the sensory world of his boyhood, 
 and from the treasury of that world come 
 thousands of beautiful passages. The 
 cowslip, with the drop of crimson in its 
 cup, in " Cymbeline," the deer seen by 
 Jaques from the roots of the oak, the 
 action of the water as Ophelia is drawn 
 down into the pool, the fairy-like bending 
 of the pease-blossom, the moonlight on 
 the wild thyme and the musk rose, the 
 eglantine, the swan's nest in the great 
 pond, the marsh marigold, the dog out 
 in the cold in " Lear," the chill before 
 the dawn in "Hamlet," the shadow of 
 the hawk stilling the singing of the lesser 
 birds, the "plain-song cuckoo gray," — a 
 quick-eyed boy noted all these things in 
 
 1 Page 171. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 91 
 
 his walks in the most beautiful lanes and 
 meadows and by the serenest river in 
 England. They were stored in his im- 
 agination, and when the time for expres- 
 sion arrived they became like illuminated 
 pictures in the text of a missal: 
 
 '* Sleep no more ! 
 Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep. 
 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care. 
 The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath. 
 Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course. 
 Chief nourisher in life's feast. 
 
 And Portia's illustration : 
 
 The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark 
 When neither is attended ! 
 
 On every page in the plays we find the 
 impressions taken from life illuminated in 
 this way, and certainly any training which 
 may so make the ordinary things of earth 
 glow through the conjunction of memory 
 and imagination must be good for the stu- 
 dent of any age. But the older a man 
 grows, the less vivid become his impres- 
 sions, so that the earlier the dramas of 
 Shakespeare are used in the training of 
 the central nervous system the better ; 
 therefore a child ought to be interested 
 
92 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 as soon as possible in the study of nature 
 and taught to absorb the beauty of the 
 natural allusions in Shakespeare's plays. 
 Shakespeare had seen the light clouds in 
 the April sky on Stratford's fields, and 
 the swan's feather float upon the swell 
 at the turn of the tide. And, later, he 
 read the story of Octavius Caesar and 
 Antony. And when he came to repre- 
 sent the parting of Octavia's husband and 
 brother from her, he makes her say : 
 
 My noble brother ! 
 
 And, looking at her, Antony speaks : 
 
 The April 's in her eyes : it is love's Spring, 
 And these the showers to bring it on. 
 
 Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can 
 Her heart inform her tongue, — the swan's down- 
 feather. 
 That stands upon the swell at full of tide. 
 And neither w^ay inclines. 
 
 The thing seen — the veriest trifle it 
 may seem to be at the moment — be- 
 comes part of the imagination, to give a 
 new beauty to thoughts and emotions, and 
 to make life full of suggestiveness. This 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 93 
 
 synthesis between the sight of a thing and 
 the power of assimilating it imaginatively 
 is, often seems to be, a poetic gift, — in 
 Shakespeare's case a supreme and inexpli- 
 cable gift, according to the older philoso- 
 phers ; an explicable gift according to the 
 younger. It is his alone, and, because he 
 possessed genius or had an unusually live 
 brain, he has produced a new wonder for 
 the world ; consequently, his powers of 
 assimilation and of giving out the result 
 of this assimilation were special with him, 
 and, though they may be admired, they 
 cannot be imitated. No student of the 
 soul will deny this. For the pupil it is 
 not a question of being a genius, but it 
 is a question of getting the greatest pos- 
 sible amount of contentment out of life. 
 Men reach toward brightness and rest and 
 change, as the small sapling in the dense 
 wood straightens itself toward the light. 
 Psychologists have said, over and over 
 again, that it is the avocations not the 
 vocations of life that make it pleasant; 
 the means of higher pleasure cannot be 
 too greatly multiplied, then, when life is 
 young. The muscles of the body sleep, 
 if not trained ; the sensory nerves and all 
 
94 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 the delicate ducts of the system require 
 early training and constant activity as 
 well. The memory becomes a precious 
 collection of dynamic associations, if the 
 art of observation and the results of this 
 art are cultivated and pointed out. To 
 store vital impressions and to so employ 
 them that they may add to the joy of life 
 is not the exclusive birthright of the poet, 
 though a Shakespeare or a Wordsworth 
 may possess it preeminently. To-day we 
 are learning to use literature as an instru- 
 ment in the education of the soul, not as 
 an end ; as a means of development, not 
 as an object to which the development 
 of a few higher beings may tend. Every 
 boy or girl may not feel Burns's thrill 
 at the sight of a daisy, or Wordsworth's 
 wonder that there should be any to whom 
 a primrose should not give 
 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 
 
 or Tennyson's passionate desire to know 
 the meaning of the flower in the crannied 
 wall, or Bryant's pleasure in the yellow 
 violet; but he may have at least a well- 
 stored memory and be taught that there 
 is an 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 95 
 
 Hour 
 Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, 
 
 and that this hour, assimilated with human 
 feeling or experience, may become a per- 
 petual joy in the memory. 
 
 The plays of Shakespeare, then, from 
 the time that the child becomes capable of 
 the process of connecting the things of 
 nature with the emanations of the soul we 
 call literature, are fine instruments ready 
 for the work of the teachers. Charles 
 Lamb, who loved much and suffered 
 much, and who never lost the insight of 
 a grown-up child, saw this ; and, seeing it, 
 helped his sister to give the world the 
 little classic called " Tales from Shake- 
 speare." Says the preface of this delight- 
 ful volume : 
 
 " The plays of Shakespeare are enrichers of 
 the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing 
 from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson 
 in all sweet and honorable thoughts and actions, 
 to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, human- 
 ity; for of examples teaching these vinues his 
 pages are full." 
 
 The preface hints at the necessity of 
 keeping the plays from very young persons, 
 
96 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 and suggests that young gentlemen, who 
 are permitted to range in their father's 
 library at an earlier age than their sisters, 
 should, after careful selection, read certain 
 parts of the plays to them. The demand 
 for supplementary reading in the primary 
 schools has been answered by " The 
 Beginner's Shakespeare." ^ Charles and 
 Mary Lamb tried to retain the language 
 of Shakespeare in their charming stories 
 as much as possible, and their work 
 remains as important in introduction to 
 Shakespeare as that other classic, the 
 "Tanglewood Tales," is to the Grecian 
 myths. The acknowledgment of the 
 value of Shakespeare's verse in develop- 
 ing the faculty of imagination has pro- 
 duced other carefully arranged editions for 
 the young. The mere story, though it 
 excited interest, was not enough, for the 
 plots of Shakespeare's plays are only 
 skeletons, and the arranged words of such 
 dramas as can be adapted for the very 
 young are needed in the cultivation of the 
 imagination. No masterpieces of litera- 
 ture are so well adapted for this end. 
 
 ^ Boston : Heath & Co. -, Home and School Classics. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 97 
 
 In the higher schools into which 
 Shakespeare's plays have been introduced 
 by wise educators, and the necessity of 
 their study as part of the English require- 
 ments for entrance into colleges insisted 
 upon, several very unpedagogical mis- 
 takes have been made. The editions 
 have been overburdened with notes, — 
 some of them foolish or obvious and 
 others so written as to avoid any expla- 
 nation of real difficulties ; and the study 
 of the metres has been almost entirely 
 neglected. I am not speaking of that 
 scientific study which would be a waste 
 of time in secondary or high schools, but 
 of that study for the purpose of culture 
 which would add much to the enjoyment 
 of the art of reading and develop the 
 sense of rhythm. Elaborate notes on 
 "Hamlet" or "Julius Caesar," for in- 
 stance, have no pedagogical value in 
 school or college courses. They satiate 
 the interest and cut off all discussion. 
 To delay the reading of a play in order to 
 consider a note that tells the pupil of the 
 Warwickshire origin of " conditioned " 
 when that word is used in Act III, Scene 
 2 of "The Merchant of Venice" or that 
 
98 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 "to pun'* in Act II, Scene i of "Troilus 
 and Cressida" means in Warwickshire 
 " to quilt, leather, or pound " a man 
 severely, and to compare the Warwick- 
 shire meaning with that of five other 
 dialects, is simply to impede the move- 
 ment of the drama. In many cases the 
 aim of both the editor and the teacher 
 seems to be to burden the memory with 
 details of little moment compared with 
 the broadening and elevating of the 
 pupil's mind. The reading and study of 
 Shakespeare ought to be not with the 
 intention of inducing the student to accept 
 conclusions, but to find conclusions for 
 himself. In mathematics it is the process 
 that is valuable to the pupil ; in logic it is 
 the process too ; and in physical and 
 chemical laboratories as well, the teacher 
 and pupil often know what the results will 
 be ; but the processes of the experiment 
 are what the student must learn. The 
 page overcrowded with answers to every 
 possible question, the learned and the 
 unlearned conjectures in passages which 
 might safely be left to the student's own 
 intuition, and the constant attempt to prej- 
 udice in favor of a personal interpretation. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 99 
 
 weary the attention and deaden the 
 power of perception. The philology of 
 the plays ought never to be neglected, 
 but a too minute inquiry into it — espe- 
 cially if the editor and the teacher do all 
 the inquiring — is contrary to the axiom 
 that the student, in all grades, should 
 work for himself, with only such assistance 
 as may clear his path without making it a 
 royal road. 
 
 In some of the high schools too many 
 plays are read lazily and without due 
 attention to the condition of English 
 speech in the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 time. While minute philological details, 
 merely memorized, are detrimental to the 
 progress of the development of the stu- 
 dent, certain important changes, particu- 
 larly the gradual loss of the Old English 
 inflections, ought to be pointed out and 
 illustrated, as well as the various meanings 
 which distinguish modern words from 
 those of the same form used by Shake- 
 speare and his contemporaries. It is 
 very easy to do too much of this. The 
 study of Shakespeare in secondary and 
 high schools must be to the student a 
 labor of love. The moment it becomes 
 
 Lora 
 
100 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 perfunctory it ceases to be worth the 
 effort. A good text, a glossary, a fac- 
 simile of the First Folio, and an enthu- 
 siastic teacher will work wonders. 
 
 Students whose reading has been al- 
 most incredibly limited will learn to get 
 the best from " Hamlet " or " The Mer- 
 chant of Venice," and, outside of the 
 mental development, they will soon learn 
 " by the feel," as it were, by the un- 
 conscious refinement of taste that comes 
 of familiar contact with masterpieces, to 
 know the inferior literary production 
 when they see it. A man or a woman 
 brought up with " Hamlet " is not likely 
 to speak of Marie Corelli as one of 
 the elect. The purification of taste is a 
 work not unworthy of the best-equipped 
 teacher. The rustic boy, fresh from the 
 plough, whose reading has been confined 
 to rudimentary text-books and the country 
 paper, if he be kept in close association 
 with one of Shakespeare's best plays can- 
 not fail to be so strengthened in taste and 
 prejudiced in favor of luminousness, clean- 
 ness, and beauty that he will neglect lesser 
 things. I have observed that, from the 
 boy of ten to the student of thirty, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS loi 
 
 Shakespeare speaks to each according to 
 his capacity. 
 
 Of the hundreds of doctors* theses 
 from the German universities Shakespeare 
 furnishes the material for scores. At 
 Oxford, even, and in the Cambridge 
 Tripos, where one hardly expects to find 
 an appeal to mere taste, he is important 
 as a basis for historical and philological 
 work ; in fact, into every department 
 in practical pedagogy Shakespeare enters 
 more and more ; but in the intermediate 
 and undergraduate courses one of his 
 chief values is that, properly assimilated, 
 he stands in the way of that mental 
 frivolity and dissipation which, while 
 it demands the multiplication of nev/ 
 books, is ruinous to all concentrated and 
 consecutive thought. " The great relig- 
 ious poets, the imaginative teachers of 
 the heart, are never easy reading," Fred- 
 erick Harrison says in "The Choice of 
 Books." And Shakespeare, who is the 
 first of the imaginative teachers, is not easy 
 reading from the point of view of the mob 
 that spends half a lifetime in ''sucking 
 magazines and new poems." Frederick 
 Harrison further says : 
 
102 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 " It is a true psychological problem, this nau- 
 sea which idle culture seems to produce for all 
 that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. The 
 intellectual system of most of us in these days 
 needs ' to purge and to live cleanly.' Only by 
 a course of treatment shall we bring our minds 
 to feel at peace with the grand, pure works of 
 the world. To understand a great national poet, 
 such as Dante, Calderon, or Goethe, is to know 
 other types of human civilization, in ways in 
 which a library of history does not sufficiently 
 teach. The great masterpieces of the world are 
 thus, quite apart from the charm and solace they 
 give us, the master instruments of a solid 
 education." 
 
 Nobody pretends that Shakespeare^s 
 plays are all great or all worthy of serious 
 attention, or that they all have pedagogi- 
 cal possibilities beyond the uses of their 
 philology ; the greatest of them have 
 defects, but these very defects are so 
 personal, so natural, so much of the time, 
 that even they may be made subjects for 
 pregnant study. But when Shakespeare is 
 noble he is supremely noble. His variety 
 is infinite, and his power of stimulus and 
 suggestion so strong that, once beloved, 
 once even partially understood, he helps 
 us to acquire that force of rejection which 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 103 
 
 the modern reader, above all things, needs. 
 The real teacher's motto is, " For the 
 greater glory of God," and he groups 
 together all beautiful and great things 
 about his student beneath this motto. It 
 is like the cross, as Ruskin saw it, in 
 St. Mark's at Venice, — the great central 
 fact. It is often borne in upon him, with 
 an iteration that makes him desperate, 
 how futile his efforts are against popular 
 currents because in early life the pseudo- 
 student's taste has not been directed. 
 This taste is broad in the worst sense, 
 and it accepts the road of the least resist- 
 ance. It offers no obstacle to the vain, 
 the frivolous, the philosophically untrue, 
 or the sensuously destructive. Its de- 
 lights are those of the dreamer, with no 
 intellectual pilot. 
 
 It seems to be forgotten that good taste 
 is one of the surest tonics for moral think- 
 ing. The teacher may talk as forcibly 
 as Mr. Frederick Harrison has written 
 on the value of the great books ; he 
 may declare with passion that a few books 
 are best, but the popular desire for 
 easy reading — foi the book about books, 
 for the thing talked about — will be too 
 
104 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 much for him. And yet, we all accept 
 the truth of the maxim of St. Thomas, 
 " Natura autem nulli deest in necessariis " ; 
 and therefore the soul has its splendid 
 auxiliary, the body. Why not admit that 
 the education of the spiritual sense ought 
 to have as auxiliary the education of its 
 helper, good taste, at the earliest possible 
 moment? The teacher needs all the as- 
 sistance he can get from the soul of his 
 pupil, and if the soul be prejudiced in 
 favor of what is beautiful, his work be- 
 comes one of progression. It is a truism 
 to say that trailing clouds of glory should 
 surround the young soul, and that its 
 earthly guardians should, if possible, keep 
 the knowledge of evil from it ; all the 
 adepts in child study have said this a 
 thousand times. 
 
 Let us be practical about it ; and if 
 we admit that good taste in art and litera- 
 ture is a desirable aid to the seeing of 
 that beauty which God gives us on earth, 
 as a help to the knowledge of Him, 
 why should we not, from the beginning 
 of the child's school life, keep the evil 
 of low aims from it? There should be 
 no disputing about tastes, in the sense 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 105 
 
 that there is, as regards truly great works, 
 only one standard of taste ; and this 
 standard should be tactfully applied. 
 The atheist who would sneer at the 
 Book of Job or Isaiah or the Apoca- 
 lypse, from the point of view of literary 
 beauty, would judge himself. Similarly, 
 only a barbarian would attempt to displace 
 Dante from the niche in which the univer- 
 sal consensus has put him. But the man 
 who admires the Bible or Dante without 
 reading either or knowing of himself why 
 they are great is a dumb, driven follower 
 of beauty. While Shakespeare never 
 touches the grandeur of the Apocalypse 
 or the majesty of Dante, he remains as 
 the finest interpreter of the heart that the 
 world has ever known. The story of 
 " The Merchant of Venice,'' full of the 
 interest of romance when we are very 
 young, becomes later a criticism of life, a 
 treasure-house of philosophy, the tragedy 
 of a soul and of a nation. It is the 
 material, properly used, with which the 
 teacher may work wonders for the solace 
 of middle life, for the consolation of old 
 age. In truth, if all the " Rhetorics " 
 were taken away, and the teacher were to 
 
io6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 use " Hamlet " or " King Lear " or " The 
 Merchant of Venice " or " As You Like 
 It," as physicists use materials in their 
 laboratories, we should have clearer-headed 
 men and women, very easily expressing 
 themselves ; for, in English at least, 
 there can be no rules of rhetoric capable 
 of vitalized application which are not 
 drawn from the practices of the masters. 
 Dr. Rolfe has an admirable page on the 
 teaching of elementary rhetoric by the- in- 
 ductive method.^ Professor Rolfe says : 
 
 " In the reading of poetry the essential prin- 
 ciples and laws of versification may be taught, 
 the pupil being made to deduce them for him- 
 self from the poem before him ; ... it is the 
 right time for learning what children of larger 
 growth often fail to acquire. The young child 
 never errs in the rhythmical rendering of Mother 
 Goose, that classic of the nursery ; but adults 
 and teachers, and sometimes even college pro- 
 fessors, who have lost the childish sensitiveness 
 to the music of verse, will often blunder in read- 
 ing or reciting Shakespeare." 
 
 Mr. Rolfe further indicates the use of 
 those masterpieces in the teaching of 
 
 1 The Elementary Study of English, by W. J. Rolfe, 
 Litt. D. Harper & Bros. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 107 
 
 elementary rhetoric. All young persons 
 use tropes in daily conversation. 
 
 " The small boy, who is so much given to 
 similes that when he is hard up for a mere 
 specific comparison he will say ' like anythi?ig^' 
 making up in emphasis what the expression 
 lacks in point and precision, will not be slow to 
 recognize that sort of thing in the printed page 
 if you call his attention to it. He will pick out 
 the similes and metaphors as readily as the nouns 
 and verbs, and explain the resemblances on 
 which they are based, as easily as the syntax 
 
 of subject and predicate To note and 
 
 name these figures soon becomes a merely 
 mechanical process — much like parsing, and 
 as profitless ; but to see whether the figure is 
 apt or expressive or beautiful, and to find out 
 and explain why it is so, is a practical lesson in 
 truth and criticism." 
 
 The material for these exercises is sup- 
 plied by any of the great plays of Shake- 
 speare. No English author gives, ready 
 at hand, such a wealth of objects on which 
 to expend mental energy. The skilful 
 teacher has long ago discarded the volume 
 of "elegant extracts." It was Walter 
 Savage Landor who, I think, said of 
 somebody's sonnets that he did not like 
 
io8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 his sentiment cut up into little patty pans. 
 The book of " elegant extracts " may, as 
 a rule, be classed with these mechanical 
 sonnets. But " Macbeth," " King Lear," 
 "Hamlet," "Julius Caesar," "The Tem- 
 pest," " As You Like It " may be so 
 used that they accompany the student 
 through his whole life, perennially giving 
 forth new means of enjoyment and culture. 
 Who has not noticed the ease with 
 which intelligent readers of Shakespeare 
 acquire the inflections of his verse ? And 
 when, bv practice, the metrical and rhyth- 
 mical swing of his verse has become a 
 thing of habit, a finer appreciation of all 
 verse forms in English becomes no diffi- 
 cult matter. It has been often remarked 
 that, while the teaching of English oc- 
 cupies so large a space in the catalogues 
 of the intermediate schools, — all those 
 above the rudimentary grades, — and in 
 undergraduate university courses, a knowl- 
 edge of the musical charm of English 
 verse is exceedingly rare. The elocution- 
 ists of the older days insisted that blank 
 verse should be read as prose, and the 
 prosier you made your cadences and 
 the more redundant were your gestures. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 109 
 
 the more satisfactory your elocution was 
 supposed to be. The cunning music of 
 Jaques's famous speech, beginning "All 
 the world 's a stage," was lost, because it 
 was understood that while it might be 
 scanned in classes according to outworn 
 Greek or Latin rules, its metre had no 
 relation whatever to the uttering of it ; 
 and so when the elocutionist, struggling 
 to beat the five-accented Shakespearean 
 iamb into dull monotony, spoke of the 
 "whining schoolboy," he pointed to an 
 imaginary satchel, and when he described 
 the lover 
 
 With a woeful ballad 
 Made to his mistress' eyebrow, 
 
 he touched his own, and only a very nice 
 sense of propriety prevented him from an 
 appropriate gesture when he alluded to 
 the justice : 
 
 In fair round belly with good capon lined. 
 
 After many years it has been discovered 
 that when a poet writes in verse he means 
 to produce an effect through the ear, not 
 only through the eye ; that when Shake- 
 speare wrote in prose he fitted the form 
 to the feeling, and that he intended that 
 
no THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 all his exquisite metrical interweaving of 
 verse melody should be given by the only 
 instrument capable of uttering them, — 
 that speaking voice which the pedagogues 
 too much neglect. To what better use 
 can the scene between Lear (mad through 
 pride, adulation-fed) and his daughters be 
 put than in the training of the concealed 
 qualities of the voice ? When a young 
 v^oman can utter Cordelia's words, " So 
 young, my lord, and true," with the sim- 
 plicity and the musical flow that follows 
 "so young, and so untender?" she has 
 learned more than all the rules of scansion 
 can teach her. 
 
 It was my intention to touch on some 
 further uses of Shakespeare in the art of 
 pedagogy, especially where philology and 
 history are concerned and analysis and 
 comparison are so necessary ; but I find 
 that I have already made this essay longer 
 than I wished, — yet I have only slightly 
 sketched processes which are with advan- 
 tage applied to the works of the greatest 
 of all English masters in literature. 
 
LYRISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
 COMEDIES 
 
LYRISM IN SHAKESPEARE'S 
 COMEDIES 
 
 THERE is a great difference be- 
 tween a comedy by Shakespeare 
 and a comedy by Moliere. And 
 this difference is not only the difference 
 that must exist between a play written for 
 Elizabethans, who went to the theatre de- 
 pendent on a strong appeal to the imagi- 
 nation, and people of the time of Louis 
 XIV desiring to see life as it was reflected 
 on the stage. The age of Elizabeth and 
 the age of Louis XIV were very unlike. 
 The mob that filled the pit of the Globe 
 Theatre had little affinity with the cour- 
 tiers who gathered at St. Cyr^ to listen 
 to the "Esther" of Racine, to wonder 
 whether the Count de Soissons was the 
 original of the man who discovered that 
 he had been talking prose all his life, and 
 to insinuate that the model for Tartufe 
 
 1 Letters of Madame de Sevigne, June 12, i68q ; 
 Feb, zi, 1689. 
 
 8 
 
114 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 was the Bishop of Autun.^ The real 
 difference, however, lies in the fact that 
 the plays of Moliere are comedies, pure 
 and simple, while the most beautiful of 
 Shakespeare's are lyrical extravagances. 
 Speaking of Aristotle, Cardinal Newman 
 says : " The inferior poem may, on his 
 principle, be the better tragedy." A care- 
 ful examination of any play of Moliere's 
 and a comparison of it with the best 
 comedies of Shakespeare will show that 
 Shakespeare was, by all odds, a poet, while 
 Moliere was not a poet at all, but, in the 
 best sense, a comedian of the highest 
 order. Leaving out the question as to 
 the distinctly opposite views of life and 
 their art taken by these men of genius, 
 I may say that the essential difference 
 between them is the difference between 
 poetry and prose. And though prose 
 may be not unmusical, yet it is never 
 lyrical, and all the plays of Shakespeare, 
 except in certain prosaic passages intro- 
 duced consciously, are lyrical ; they are 
 
 1 It must have been the enemies of Mgr. de Roquette 
 who whispered this, for the real Tartufe was a certain 
 M. Fertant. See ** La Vraie Fin dc Tartufe," Re-vue. 
 Bleue^ May 13, 1899. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 115 
 
 full of emotion, mood, feeling, the quality 
 of aspiration, musically expressed. The 
 music of the composer and the music 
 of the poet are not the same, but they 
 touch each other. The poet who lives 
 in a musical time will set his cadences 
 and pauses to the tunes he hears. The 
 air is full of music, and the accent of 
 familiar songs sets the mould for the 
 metres of the bard. 
 
 Shakespeare's time was the most musi- 
 cal that England ever knew. The lute 
 and the spinet were everywhere ; the 
 madrigal and the glee so common that 
 at any moment in the day voices were 
 ready to join in them. " It was the 
 Puritan,"^ George Brandes says, "who 
 cast out music from the daily life of 
 England. Spinets stood in the barbers' 
 shops for the use of customers waiting 
 their turn." Music tried to get back 
 with the Restoration, as we see from 
 the passionate devotion of both Evelyn 
 and Pepys, to the part-songs, but it had 
 gone out of the everyday existence of 
 a people who after a while heard music 
 
 ^ William Shakespeare : A Critical Study, by George 
 Brandes. The Macmillan Company, 1898. 
 
ii6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 only as an exotic in the form of Italian 
 opera. But before the Reformation and 
 for a time after, all England sang. All 
 the Elizabethan dramatists break into the 
 lyrical strain, with more or less success, 
 according to the fineness of their feeling 
 and their ear. John Addington Symonds^ 
 says that the lyrical element "pervaded 
 all species of poetry in the Elizabethan 
 age. . . . We then had a native school 
 of composers, and needed not to know 
 the melodies of other lands. Every house 
 had its lute suspended on the parlor wall. 
 In every company of men and women 
 part-songs were sung." Shakespeare, the 
 foremost expresser of his time, was the 
 most lyrical, the most songful, of all 
 its writers. Dramatic expression may be 
 full and noble without the musical cadence 
 accentuated, — without that extravagance 
 of figures, that play of the fancy, that re- 
 dundance of imaginative suggestion, that 
 lark-like flight which is sustained lyri- 
 cism. There are many such forms of 
 noble dramatic expression in Shakespeare. 
 
 1 The Lyrism of the English Romantic Drama. 
 A Paper written for the Elizabethan Society of Toynbee 
 Hall. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS u; 
 
 The great scene between Hamlet and his 
 mother is not lyrical, though it has the 
 measured movement of metrical cadences. 
 It does not suggest the chant, though it 
 is intense to the finest degree. A drama 
 may be lyrical in the noblest sense ; an 
 ode must be lyrical in the noblest sense, 
 though in our time we huve lost sight 
 of the real meaning of lyrical and almost 
 limited it to sweet songs of the type of 
 which Tennyson gives us perfect speci- 
 mens in " The Princess." 
 
 It would be unnecessary to show that 
 lyrism was one of the principal qualities 
 of the Greek drama, and that, as Newman 
 says, it was founded on no scientific prin- 
 ciple ; " it was a pure recreation of the 
 imagination, revelling without object or 
 meaning beyond its own exhibition." ^ 
 The belief that holds that there is a 
 wide gulf between the classicism of 
 Sophocles and the romantic lyrism of 
 Shakespeare is unfounded. They were 
 more akin than most of us imagine. 
 While Racine and Corneille are nearer to 
 Aristotle than Shakespeare, Shakespeare 
 
 ^ Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics, 
 
ii8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 is nearer to Sophocles and Euripides 
 than Racine and Corneille. The pres- 
 ence of the declamatory, the eloquent 
 quality, is evident in the French trage- 
 dians, but seldom does the lyrical quality 
 appear. There is always reticence, the 
 restraint of feeling modulated by rigid 
 rule, seldom .the imaginative, emotional 
 outburst, put there by the author with- 
 out regard to the action of the drama, 
 and never the little song so metred that 
 its every accent and pause suggest the 
 combination of notes by which the com- 
 poser will make it ready for his harp. 
 When poetical expression is over-abundant 
 and conveys the impression that it might 
 be chanted, or sung, or even read to 
 musical accompaniment, it is lyrical. 
 Hamlet's 
 
 Confess yourself to Heaven ; 
 Repent what 's past: avoid what is to come, 
 
 is not a lyrical cry ; nor is the Queen's 
 outburst, 
 
 O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain. 
 
 But there is lyricism — so overstrained 
 that it nearly becomes bombastic rhetoric 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 119 
 
 — in the dialogue between Hamlet and 
 Laertes at the grave of Ophelia, in the 
 Queen's description of Ophelia's death, 
 and in speech after speech in Richard II. 
 For instance (Act III, Scene 2): 
 
 Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand. 
 Though rebels wound thee with their horses' hoofs ; 
 As a long-parted mother with her child 
 Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting. 
 So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth. 
 And do thee favours with my royal hands. 
 
 If Moliere's ''L'Avare" and Gold- 
 smith's "She Stoops to Conquer" are 
 comedies, Shakespeare's " As You Like 
 It," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 "The Tempest," and "The Winter's 
 Tale" certainly are not; and "Love's 
 Labour 's Lost " and "Twelfth Night" 
 
 — in fact, all except "The Comedy of 
 Errors " and " The Taming of the 
 Shrew " are very defective ones. Dia- 
 logue and dramatic interest and action, 
 realism, constitute a comedy. How ex- 
 travagant, how impossible, how undra- 
 matic, how exquisitely lyrical in every 
 sense is "As You Like It"! As for 
 the characters v/hich have any hold on 
 
120 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 local reality, they are Elizabethans, though 
 they live in No Man's Land. In essence, 
 all except Oliver are universal. Music is 
 everywhere in the atmosphere of the play. 
 There are intervals of prose, like the 
 expository conversation between Adam 
 and Orlando, in the first act, and all the 
 speeches until the shadow of the tyrant 
 Duke falls upon the scene. There are 
 hints of music, as if the violinists were 
 trying their instruments, but the lyrical 
 quality of the play is not shown until we 
 enter the Forest of Arden. The sentiment 
 of the forest permeates every line until 
 Amiens begins to sing : 
 
 Under the greenwood tree 
 
 Who loves to lie with me. 
 
 And turn his merry note 
 
 Unto the sweet bird's throat. 
 Come hither, come hither, come hither ; 
 
 Here shall he see 
 
 No enemy 
 But Winter and rough weather. 
 
 Then comes the chorus : 
 
 Who doth ambition shun. 
 And loves to live i' the sun. 
 Seeking the food he eats. 
 And pleased with what he gets. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 121 
 
 Come hither, come hither, come hither ; 
 
 Here shall he see 
 
 No enemy 
 But Winter and rough weather. 
 
 There are many passages where the 
 overwrought, high-strained appeal to 
 the imagination seems to resemble the 
 euphuistic affectation which Shakespeare 
 ridiculed in Polonius and Osric, — the 
 speeches at the grave in " Hamlet " are 
 examples. In extenuation, it must be 
 remembered that the theatre of Shake- 
 speare was barren of all those accessories 
 which force stage effects upon our sight 
 to-day. There were no waving leaves, 
 where shadows are cast by calcium lights 
 upon tufts of grass, in the Globe or the 
 Rose Theatre, at the end of the sixteenth 
 century. At court the Queen's Master 
 of the Revels, Edmund Tylney, could 
 command scenic apparatus almost as 
 splendid as Calderon used at the Palace 
 of Buen Retiro. But the theatre of 
 Shakespeare, where the royal masques 
 were not given, was forced to appeal 
 through the ear rather than the eye. 
 
 A boy acted Rosalind or Ophelia, Per- 
 dita or Juliet, and the fairies in "A 
 
122 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream " were rosy- 
 cheeked urchins, more suggestive of roast 
 beef and Yorkshire pudding than moon- 
 light and cobwebs. Most of us more 
 enjoy a play of Shakespeare's read in 
 quietness than presented to us subject 
 to all the accidents of theatrical realism. 
 This is because Shakespeare left nothing 
 to such accidents. With no scenery and 
 sometimes not even a screen, the sides of 
 his platform occupied by loungers, with- 
 out the means of changing the effect from 
 light to darkness, he is obliged to force 
 the illusion by the imaginative powers of 
 the text. He cannot keep the expres- 
 sions of his characters down to the level 
 of ordinary life ; their speech must soar 
 in imagination and it must have in ex- 
 pression musical cadences. The modern 
 opera has its reason in this need to be 
 lyrical. It is artificial ; it can never, if it 
 retain its absurd libretti or depend on the 
 Wagnerian effects, appeal to the imagina- 
 tion as cadenced lyrical dramas, such as 
 "As You Like It" and "The Tem- 
 pest" ; for the imagination is clogged, held 
 down, by too much realism. The desire 
 to uplift by means of sonorous lyrical 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 123 
 
 words set to music is at the root of the 
 creation of the opera. The Church — if 
 I may be permitted to say so — has, es- 
 pecially in the Tenebrae, shown how far 
 dramatic suggestiveness may go without 
 dragging the imagination too near reality. 
 Shakespeare was an unconscious psycholo- 
 gist, and he, applying his genius to lesser 
 themes, understood admirably the essen- 
 tial quality of suggestion. When rheto- 
 ric seems, as with Laertes, to approach 
 rant, it is the result of the poet's deter- 
 mination to make the lounging gallants 
 and the citizens and *prentice boys forget 
 themselves in the high-pitched passion of 
 the moment, — for this great artist could 
 rely only on the influence of uttered 
 words. His soliloquies — dramatic expe- 
 diency forcing him to make his character 
 speak to the public the very processes of 
 his secret thought — are unquestioned by 
 men of taste, because their seriousness and 
 dignity are supported by fitting musical 
 cadences. Under the master's art-spell, 
 we forget that the sable-hued Hamlet 
 ought to be absurd as he stands — the 
 other characters having conveniently left 
 him alone — not in self-communing silence. 
 
124 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 but in outspoken analysis of his own mind. 
 Shakespeare meant to bear our imagina- 
 tions into his world, and he succeeded ; he 
 is more of a magician than Prospero. 
 
 Perhaps of all the plays, " As You Like 
 It " is most lyrical in structure. Newman 
 says : 
 
 " We may liken the Greek drama to the music 
 of the Italian school ; in which the wonder is, 
 how so much richness of invention in detail can 
 be accommodated to a style so simple and uni- 
 form. Each is the development of grace, fancy, 
 pathos, and taste, in the respective media of 
 representation and sound.'* 
 
 Dr. Newman may have thought of 
 the school of Mozart, but certainly not 
 of the artificialities of Donizetti or Bellini. 
 Similarly, "As You Like It'* resembles 
 the structure which underlies the operas 
 of the Italian composers. There are 
 recitatives, the duets, arias, and those 
 particularly English madrigal effects, which 
 accentuate the pastoral feeling when the 
 imagination needs the stimulus of more 
 pronounced music. The Duke opens 
 the first scene in the forest with the 
 recitativo which closes : 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 125 
 
 Sweet are the uses of adversity. 
 
 Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous. 
 
 Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; » 
 
 And this our life exempt from public haunt 
 
 Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 
 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 
 
 I would not change it. 
 
 There Is a snatch of dialogue between 
 the exiled Duke and Amiens, and the 
 First Lord begins his recitativo, — and 
 an exquisitely lyrical one it is, — the de- 
 scription of the oak and the deer, and the 
 moralizing of the melancholy Jaques. It 
 impedes the action ; Moliere would not 
 have tolerated it ; modern theatrical man- 
 agers cut it out ; it would be permitted 
 only in a musical play. 
 
 The lyrical phrases change and inter- 
 weave. Sllvius breaks forth : 
 
 O, thou did'st then ne'er love so heartily ! 
 
 If thou remember'st not the slightest folly 
 
 That ever love did make thee run into. 
 
 Thou hast not loved; 
 
 Or if thou hast not sat as I do now. 
 
 Wearying thy hearer in thy mistress' praise. 
 
 Thou hast not loved ; 
 
 Or if thou hast not broke from company 
 
 Abruptly, as my passion now makes me. 
 
 Thou hast not loved. 
 
126 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 When Orlando appeals to the foresters 
 for his fainting old servant, Adam, we hear 
 the same cadences, artfully changed, — 
 
 But whate'er you are 
 That in this desert inaccessible. 
 Under the shade of melancholy boughs. 
 Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; 
 If ever you have look'd on better days. 
 If ever been where bells have knoll' d to church. 
 If ever sat at any good man's feast. 
 If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear 
 And know what 't is to pity and be pitied. 
 Let gentleness my strong enforcement be; 
 In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. 
 
 And when Jaques has ended his sad 
 recitativoy 
 
 All the world ' s a stage, 
 
 Shakespeare waves his baton, and the 
 meditative mood is relieved, but not in- 
 terrupted by the lusty Amiens : 
 
 Blow, blow, thou winter wind. 
 Thou art not so unkind 
 
 As man's ingratitude; 
 Thy tooth is not so keen. 
 Because thou art not seen. 
 
 Although thy breath be rude. 
 
 With a rush the chorus comes in — 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 127 
 
 Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly: 
 Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly: 
 
 Then, heigh-ho, the holly ! 
 
 This life is most jolly. 
 
 Amiens regains the thread of the 
 melody : 
 
 Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky. 
 That dost not bite so nigh 
 
 As benefits forgot: 
 Though thou the waters warp. 
 Thy sting is not so sharp 
 
 As friend remember' d not. 
 
 Orlando opens Scene 2 of Act III 
 with a new rhymed lyrical movement, 
 and disappears to let the inferior Corin 
 and Touchstone talk in everyday prose. 
 In Scene 2 of Act V there is the quar- 
 tette of Silvius, Phebe, Rosalind, and 
 Orlando, with the suggestion of the fugue. 
 It is not set to the music of the composer, 
 and there is no direction in the text for 
 musical accompaniment, but no reader 
 could utter it without making verbal 
 music the recurrent cadence : 
 
 Phe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to 
 
 love. 
 5/7. It is to be all made of sighs and tears ; 
 And so am I for Phebe, 
 
128 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Phe. And I for Ganymede. 
 Orl, And I for Rosalind. 
 Ros. And I for no woman. 
 
 Silvlus has his solo part: 
 
 It is to be all made of fantasy. 
 
 All made of passion, and all made of wishes, 
 
 All adoration, duty, and observance. 
 
 All humbleness, all patience and impatience. 
 
 All purity, all trial, all observance. 
 
 And so am I for Phebe. 
 
 Phe. And so am I for Ganymede. 
 
 Orl. And so am I for Rosalind. 
 
 Ros. And so am I for no woman. 
 
 Phebe, after this cadence, takes a new 
 rhythmical modulation — 
 
 Phe. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
 you ? 
 
 Sil. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
 you ? 
 
 Orl. If this be so, why blame you me to love 
 you ? 
 
 Ros. Who do you speak to, '* Why blame you 
 me to love you ? ' * 
 
 Orl. To her that is not here, nor doth not hear. 
 
 The last act is made up of musical 
 cadences, with a short interval of prose. 
 The vocal fugue is imitated, especially in 
 the speeches of Jaques and Rosalind, and 
 the real song of that act is Hymen's : 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 129 
 
 Then is there mirth in heaven 
 When earthly things made even 
 Atone together. 
 
 " The Winter's Tale " is lyrical from 
 beginning to end. The rogue, Autolycus, 
 has some delightful snatches of song : 
 
 and 
 
 When daffodils begin to peer 
 
 Lawn as white as driven snow; 
 Cyprus black as e'er was crow; 
 Gloves as sweet as damask roses; 
 Masks for faces and for noses. 
 
 And his part in the trio with Dorcas and 
 Mopsa — 
 
 Get you hence, for I must go, 
 Where it fits not you to know. 
 
 D. Whither ? M. Oh, whither : D. Whither ? 
 
 For the delicate management of the 
 pauses, for musical suggestiveness, for 
 convincing appeal to the fancy, what can 
 be better than the trio of the Shepherd, Po- 
 lixenes, and Perdita, in Act IV, Scene 4 : 
 
 O Proserpina, 
 For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall 
 From Dis's waggon ! daffodils. 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 9 
 
130 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The winds of March with beauty; violets dim. 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath. 
 
 There is the aubade, in " Cymbeline," 
 which bursts through the prose of Cloten's 
 speech : 
 
 Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings. 
 
 And Phcebus 'gins arise. 
 His steeds to water at those springs 
 
 On chaliced flowers that lies ; 
 And winking Mary-buds begin 
 
 To ope their golden eyes : 
 With everything that pretty is. 
 
 My lady sweet, arise. 
 Arise, arise ! 
 
 Over Imogen's body Arviragus speaks : 
 
 We '11 say our song the whilst. Brother, begin. 
 
 Gut, Fear no more the heat o' the sun. 
 
 Nor the furious winter's rages ; 
 
 Thou thy worldly task hast done. 
 
 Home «rt gone, and ta'en thy wages ; 
 Golden lads and girls all must 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
 
 Arv. Fear no more the frown o' the great ; 
 Thou art past the tyrant's stroke; 
 Care no more to clothe and eat ; 
 
 To thee the reed is as the oak ; 
 The sceptre, learning, physic, must 
 All follow this, and come to dust. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 131 
 
 Gut. Fear no more the lightning-flash, 
 Arv, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone. 
 Gut, Fear not slander, censure rash ; 
 Arv. Thou hast finished joy and moan. 
 Both. All lovers young, all lovers must 
 Consign to thee, and come to dust. 
 
 Gui. No exerciser harm thee ! 
 Arv. Nor no witchcraft charm thee ! 
 Gui. Ghost unlaid forbear thee ! 
 Arv. Nothing ill come near thee ! 
 Both. Quiet consummation have. 
 
 And renowned be thy grave ! 
 
 Mr. Symonds says : 
 
 " These songs cannot be regarded as occa- 
 sional ditties, interpolated for the delectation of 
 the audience. . . . They condense the particu- 
 lar emotion of the tragedy or comedy in a quin- 
 tessential drop of melody. Mr. Pater has dwelt 
 upon a single instance of this fact with his usual 
 felicity of phrase. Speaking of the song in 
 'Measure for Measure,' he remarks that in it 
 the kindling power and poetry of the whole play 
 seem to pass for a moment into an actual strain 
 of music." 
 
 It is an actual strain of music, needing 
 neither string nor wind instrument, but 
 only the inspiration of unforced breath. It 
 has all the qualities of music except pitch. 
 (Portia was musical. When it comes to 
 
132 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Bassanio's turn to choose the casket, she 
 is devoured with anxiety. She cannot 
 tell him that the leaden box contains the 
 key of his fate and hers. He, led by 
 deluding fancy, may choose the gold or 
 silver box. She must not speak, she can- 
 not give him a hint in words of hers, but 
 another may sing. } She confesses this to 
 nobody, but makes a prelude to her care- 
 fully chosen lyric : 
 
 Let music sound while he doth make his choice ; 
 Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end. 
 Fading in music. 
 
 And, while Bassanio comments on the 
 caskets to himself, the song goes on : 
 
 Tell me where is fancy bred. 
 Or in the heart or in the head ? 
 How begot, how nourished ? 
 
 Reply, reply. 
 It is engender'd in the eyes. 
 With gazing fed ; and fancy dies 
 In the cradle where it lies. 
 
 Let us all ring fancy's knell; 
 
 I'll begin it — Ding, dong, bell. 
 All. Ding, dong, bell. 
 
 Bassanio had more than tlie usual van- 
 ity of his sex, and he was as thoughtlessly 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 133 
 
 selfish as any other spirited gallant of his 
 time, but he had a pretty wit and he 
 catches the hint. 
 
 So may the outward shows be least themselves ; 
 The world is still deceived with ornament. 
 
 On the message of this lyric depends 
 the turn of the play, and yet how easily 
 and naturally it is dropped in ! It falls 
 so gently that it seems to be a gliding 
 strain caught as a point of rest in the sus- 
 pensive interest of the moment, but it 
 determines Bassanio's action. 
 
 There are musicians who thank heaven 
 for " A Midsummer Night's Dream " be- 
 cause it suggested Mendelssohn's music. 
 Herr Ambros, in " The Boundaries of 
 Music and Poetry," seems to draw very 
 near to this. He says : 
 
 " When we are listening to the wonderfully 
 elusive, fluttering, skipping, bantering G-minor 
 scherzo (this miracle of instrumentation) intro- 
 ducing Puck's roguish pranks, we believe every- 
 thing which the poet relates of him — before our 
 eyes. Puck skips into the side scenes ; to our ears, 
 he actually flies like the arrow from the Indian's 
 bow ; and we believe the ear more than the 
 eye." 
 
134 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 This is true — but only after we have 
 known the play and steeped ourselves in 
 the scent of the musk-roses and seen the 
 moonlight on the banks of wild thyme. 
 It is to the ear that Shakespeare speaks, 
 — even a cursory study of his lyrism will 
 make that plain ; he speaks through 
 music, but it is a music more evanescent, 
 less palpable, but more directly expressive 
 than Mendelssohn's, because it is a music 
 essential to the words themselves, not a 
 set of musical sounds speaking a com- 
 poser's impressions of them. Where 
 Shakespeare has given 
 
 To airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name, 
 
 Mendelssohn interprets it in music ; the 
 G-minor scherzo might mean almost any- 
 thing gay, if the composer of " Songs with- 
 out Words" had not told us of the theme 
 on which he founded it. No ; the music 
 of Mendelssohn may suggest, but never so 
 directly and unequivocally as the metred 
 phrases of the lyrist. Shakespeare knew 
 this, and, better than this, he knew that 
 his appeal must be by concordant words 
 to the emotions, through the imagination. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 135 
 
 He must make pictures too. And in 
 the old days at Stratford, in the homely- 
 country lanes and fields, he had gathered 
 all the material for these pictures. The 
 folk-song heard at twilight, the glimpse 
 of the spot in the chalice of the cowslip 
 like a drop of blood, the dying fall of the 
 madrigal as the shepherds went their way 
 to the shearing, the daisies " smell-less, 
 yet most quaint," — all these had become 
 part of his younger life, and about them 
 sounded the echoes of the glees and rustic 
 dances. Thus the picture and the ac- 
 cented words were one. 
 
 No realism can altogether ruin the 
 lyrism of " A Midsummer Night^s 
 Dream " ; for the poet, forced to soar 
 above the sordid surroundings of his 
 theatre, made an appeal with all the 
 strength of his genius, strengthened by 
 many garnered treasures drawn from 
 Nature herself, which Mendelssohn or 
 Berlioz could only suggest, but never 
 reach. The pleasanter dramas of Shake- 
 speare, without the lyrism, would still be 
 the masterpieces of character and philoso- 
 phy taken from life, but they would not 
 deserve the name of comedies in Moliere's 
 
136 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 sense, nor could they be justly held to 
 compare with his. They would lack that 
 exquisite, permeative charm that makes 
 them the most beautiful things of their 
 kind under heaven. And the strength of 
 this charm is in part due to the fact that 
 even the smallest lyric arises from the 
 feeling of the composition and intensifies 
 it. The melodious " Spring Song " at 
 the end of "Love's Labor's Lost" is at 
 once a conclusion and a harbinger. Men- 
 delssohn, the composer, recalls the Spring, 
 but only when we know beforehand that 
 he intends to recall it ; the " Winter Song " 
 has the meaning of an epilogue. And the 
 very bloom of the mood of the Duke, in 
 " Twelfth Night," is accented by 
 
 That old and antique song we heard last night : 
 Methought it did relieve my passion much. 
 More than light airs and recollected terms 
 Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times : 
 Come, but one verse. . . . 
 
 ** Come away, come away, death. 
 
 And in sad cypress let me be laid." 
 
 And the Prince Ferdinand's amazement 
 is turned to sad remembrance by Ariers 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 137 
 
 song, which is as much a part of the feel- 
 ing of the moment as the glow is in a 
 ruby. 
 
 Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
 
 Of his bones are coral made ; 
 Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 
 Nothing of him that doth fade 
 
 But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange. 
 Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell : 
 
 Ding-dong. 
 Hark ! now I hear them, — Ding-dong, bell. 
 
 What can be said of these lyrics, except 
 that, whether invented by Shakespeare or 
 borrowed from antique songs, they were 
 made by him essential to the works in 
 which they appear ? While their echoes 
 are with me I shall write no more ; for, as 
 Armado says, 
 
 The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs 
 Of Apollo. You that way; we this way. 
 
THE PUZZLE OF HAMLET 
 
THE PUZZLE OF HAMLET 
 
 "f I "^HE puzzle of Hamlet" is a 
 I phrase frequently repeated ; and 
 JL. the more "Hamlet" is con- 
 sidered by the critics, the oftener it is re- 
 peated. The reasons for it may be found in 
 the lack of serious study given to the text 
 of this incomparable drama and psycho- 
 logical study, as well as in the neglect by 
 readers of culture of the contemporary 
 literature of Shakespeare's time. Added 
 to these is the strange habit of guessing 
 at Shakespeare's meaning from a modern 
 point of view. This habit is fixed by the 
 determination of so many persons to read 
 the past as if we possessed the one ray 
 capable of illuminating it. It is as if we 
 thought the secrets of old rolls of papy- 
 rus could reveal themselves only under 
 the rays of the electric light. " Hamlet " 
 has been made a puzzle because of our 
 inability to look at the text from the 
 point of view of a contemporary. " 'Ow 
 
142 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 could Shakespeare 'ave lived in such a 
 nasty 'ouse without gas ? " asked a Cock- 
 ney at Stratford. It is easy to supply 
 the gas. 
 
 In one of the most scholarly works in the 
 department of English literature written 
 in the last fifteen years, " A History of 
 Criticism," George Saintsbury says, speak- 
 ing of the critical necessity of confining 
 ourselves to the actual texts : 
 
 "This is not perhaps a fashionable proceed- 
 ing. Not what Plato says, but what the latest 
 commentator says about Plato ; not what 
 Chaucer says, but what the latest thesis-writer 
 thinks about Chaucer, — is supposed to be the 
 qualifying study of the scholar. I am not able 
 to share this conception of scholarship. When 
 we have read and digested the whole of Plato, 
 we may, if we like, turn to his latest German 
 editor; when we have read and digested the 
 whole of Shakespeare, and of Shakespeare's 
 contemporaries, we may, if we like, turn to 
 Shakespearean biographers and commentators." 
 
 A fault in much Shakespearean criti- 
 cism is that it is too reverential. The 
 writer who scans the Bible, alert to find 
 an anachronism or an exaggeration, 
 sprawls at full length before the silliest 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 143 
 
 " sallet " of the Bard of Avon, or perhaps 
 of Messrs. Hemynge and Condell, in 
 rapt admiration. Hysterical girls after a 
 morning recital by Paderewski are no 
 more ecstatic than some of the Shake- 
 spearean acolytes. This blazon ought 
 not to be ; it makes Shakespeare an idol 
 hidden in clouds of incense, an idol to be 
 worshipped as unreasoningly as all idols 
 are worshipped. From what we can 
 discover of the English of the sixteenth 
 century — and no great list of historical 
 references is needed to show this — we 
 know that they regarded a play as a play, 
 not as an enigma to be thought about, 
 written about, discussed as a problem in" 
 philosophy. All the reconstructions of 
 the Elizabethan playhouse show that the 
 auditors went there to weep or laugh, 
 to love the hero and to detest the villain, 
 to applaud the good and to hate the bad. 
 The recent revival of the Catholic moral- 
 ity play, " Everyman,'* ought to give us 
 a clue to the truth that the drama in 
 England, from the day of its appear- 
 ance in the monasteries to the day of its 
 disappearance under the ban of ultra- 
 Protestantism, was written to be seen and 
 
144 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 heard, not to be read or academically 
 analyzed. Again, although we talk of 
 the continuity of history, we do not take 
 seriously the truth it implies, — that in 
 essentials human nature has always been 
 the same, and that by recognizing these 
 essentials we get the keys to many things 
 of the past that are closed to us by the 
 unconscious assumption that we are a 
 new order of beings, transformed by the 
 Reformation and experimental philosophy ! 
 That the Elizabethans and the Jaco- 
 beans did not, in the space of a few years, 
 break completely with the beliefs and 
 traditions of the Roman Catholic Church ; 
 that they, in spite of the manner in which 
 distance and romance have transfigured 
 them, took a matter-of-fact view of life ; 
 and that there were varying shades of be- 
 lief, opinion, and taste are facts that might 
 well be taken into consideration in dis- 
 cussing the meaning of " Hamlet." No 
 audience will flock to a playhouse to see a 
 tragedy which it does not understand or 
 with which it is out of sympathy. The 
 moralities and miracle plays were almost 
 too obvious for our present taste, but not 
 more than sufficiently obvious for the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 145 
 
 liking of the English of the fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries. The dramas of 
 Shakespeare, Fletcher, Chapman, and the 
 rest may contain a cipher : that is another 
 question. It is certain that the noble 
 earl who liked to listen to music or to 
 mingle with his countrymen of a lower 
 caste at bear-baitings did not go to see 
 " Hamlet " for the zest of solving any 
 problem, whether in cipher or not. 
 
 A lover of Shakespeare, recognizing 
 these things, has two quarrels on his 
 hands, or, at least, two reasons for irrita- 
 tion in his mind. One is with the expos- 
 itor of " Hamlet" who treats the text as 
 a mere matter for the student ; the other 
 with the actor who, having in his art so 
 many means that make for clarity, uses 
 the play as if his own personality were 
 the first thought, and the meaning of the 
 author the second. To these reasons for 
 discontent may be added the student's 
 disregard of the actor's part in the mak- 
 ing of the play, and the actor's slavish 
 obedience, in minor details, to the stu- 
 dent. The student forgets that " Hamlet" 
 was written to be acted, and the actor does 
 not recognize that neither philological 
 
146 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 guesses of the note-maker nor the 
 exact shape of Laertes' cloak is of con- 
 sequence, provided the value of each 
 character be so expressed that the meaning 
 of the tragedy is full and clear. When 
 the actor can impress on the student 
 that, if " intuitional " interpretation is to 
 be allowed, he has the advantage, because 
 he is forced in the exercise of his art to 
 take Shakespeare's point of view, we 
 may have less critical dust thrown in 
 our eyes. 
 
 There is now no difference of opinion 
 as to the position of" Hamlet" in the lit- 
 erature of the world, Voltaire having been 
 long ago thrown out of court. Insight 
 into man's heart and mind, and into the 
 fundamental varieties which underlie life, 
 expressed in words of piercing beauty and 
 aptness, is acknowledged to exist in this 
 play to an amazing degree ; but if the 
 art form in which these appear is defec- 
 tive, the symmetry of the masterpiece is 
 affected. In a word, if the play does not 
 answer all the requirements of a play, if 
 it is not interesting and clear, Shakespeare 
 made a serious mistake in adopting the 
 dramatic form. If Shakespeare was not 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 147 
 
 j ^^rp whether Hamlet was mad or not, or 
 whether he was noble or not, or whether 
 he loved Ophelia or not, or whether 
 Gertrude had sinned or not, he had the 
 commentators of the future in his mind's 
 eye, and he wrote for them ; but as 
 his utter disregard of the future of his 
 written plays shows that he did not con- 
 sider the commentators, he must have 
 hajd in mind an immediate audience. 
 And for the audience of the moment the 
 dramatist must be sure of what he wants 
 to say, and must say it with vigor. 
 There have been exceptions, no doubt, 
 but not enough to prove that a so-called 
 drama, of the vagueness of one of Henry 
 James's novels, could hold the attention 
 of normal auditors. From the first, 
 " Hamlet," as a play, is clear and admi- 
 rably constructed to meet the demands 
 of the London stage of the time. 
 
 A glance at the source of the play — 
 the " Historie of Hamblet" — connotes 
 the evident purpose of Shakespeare to 
 show that the Prince of Denmark coun- 
 terfeits madness. Hamblet, in the " His- 
 toric," is, however, a very young prince, 
 who imitates Brutus, because he knows 
 
148 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 that his father-uncle, Fengon, suspects 
 that he will avenge his father's murder as 
 soon as he comes of age. He is a pagan, 
 and he thinks and acts as a pagan ; but 
 Shakespeare was too much of his own 
 time to be able to project himself into 
 a pagan mind, and too much of an artist 
 to forgo the opportunities offered by a 
 conflict between Christianity and that na- 
 ture which Edmund in his famous so- 
 liloquy called his "goddess." In this 
 conflict lies the pregnant interest of the 
 play. 
 
 If Hamlet had Edmund's contempt 
 for any law but nature's, the play would 
 have lost its deep dramatic interest. 
 In the " Historic of Hamblet," as in 
 Malory's " Morte Arthure," paganism 
 shows plainly through the Christian 
 veneering. The translators apologize 
 for this, conscious always of the lack of 
 sympathy in their readers for a prince, 
 no matter how greatly injured, who 
 would thirst for the mere satisfaction 
 of vengeance. In "Hamlet" the pagan 
 man bursts through the habits of the 
 Christian mind. The young Prince will 
 not kill Claudius at his prayers : 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 149 
 
 Now might I do it pat, now he is praying ; 
 
 And now I '11 do 't. And so he goes to heaven ; 
 
 And so am I revenged. That would be scann'd: 
 
 A villain kills my father ; and for that, 
 
 I, his sole son, do this same villain send 
 
 To heaven. 
 
 O, this is hire and salary, not revenge. 
 
 The pagan writing on the palimpsest 
 has not been entirely effaced. Whether 
 Shakespeare had read the " Historie of 
 Hamblet" or not, or whether he founded 
 " Hamlet " on an old tragedy derived 
 from the " Historie," it is evident that he 
 had at least at heart the conflict between 
 Christian law and that lawlessness, that 
 giving way to natural impulses, — to 
 desire or hatred, knowing no law, — 
 which we call pagan. How coolly, too, 
 Hamlet sends his treacherous friends, 
 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their 
 death ! His excuse would have seemed 
 a valid one to EHzabethans, for the trai- 
 torous friends had been privy to a plot 
 for compassing the ruin of one of the 
 royal blood, and the rightful heir to the 
 throne. Horatio is astonished that these 
 two fellow-students should be let go 
 straight to their fate. Hamlet says : 
 
150 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Why, man, they did make love to this employment ; 
 They are not near my conscience ; their defeat 
 Does by their own insinuation grow. 
 
 Hamlet does not doom these traitors 
 to death in madness ; it is not madness 
 that makes him spare the King's life 
 until he can think that the murder will 
 plunge him into hell. He is frenzied 
 for the moment, when he kills Polonius, 
 behind the arras, believing that Claudius 
 is listening there ; he is nervously over- 
 wrought, and in the overwhelming horror 
 of the Ghost's revelation, striving for 
 self-control, until, in the tumult of heart 
 and brain, he seems unbalanced and 
 hysterical, but never, even for a moment, 
 mad. The madness that he alludes to, 
 in his pathetic words to Laertes, is evi- 
 denced in those episodes. It is the loss 
 of that habitual balance which he admires 
 so much in Horatio, who is never 
 " passion's slave." Passion's slave at 
 times Hamlet is. In this consists his 
 madness. 
 
 Hamlet is essentially noble ; he may 
 
 decline from the law, but he knows, 
 
 loves, and respects it. Claudius, on the 
 
 ^<K)ther hand, being a man of parts, knows 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 151 
 
 and hates it ; he sins, and trembles before 
 God, but before man he is every inch a 
 king, in spite of Hamlet's passionate 
 exaggeration of his defects. He accepts 
 evil with open eyes. He would be vir- 
 tuous if virtue could be reconciled with 
 friendship for the world, the flesh, and 
 the devil. He would be good if he 
 were not compelled to make satisfaction 
 for evil done to his neighbor. Luther's 
 comfortable doctrine about works had 
 not been preached in Shakespeare's Den- 
 mark. Claudius is no mere " king of 
 shreds and patches," though some of the 
 commentators and most of the actors 
 make him so, — as they make an arrant 
 fool or a comic knave of Polonius, who 
 was an accomplished Euphuist and a 
 clever courtier. 
 
 It is impossible to enjoy the play, as 
 a clear and logical work, without keep- 
 ing in mind that it was written for the 
 theatre, acted under the direction of 
 Shakespeare, and made actual by what 
 the stage-manager in our time would call 
 " business." And this " business," — 
 the technical direction for the dumb 
 show, or the actions suited to the word. 
 
152 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 — which elucidates the meaning of 
 speech, must have been as delicately and 
 carefully considered as is every line in the 
 text. The record of this " business " we 
 have lost, and the loss is irreparable. 
 If it existed, the student who looks on 
 " Hamlet " as a text detached from dra- 
 matic action would not have had matters 
 so much his own way, and the actor who 
 derives most of his traditions from the 
 practice of other actors of no greater 
 knowledge than himself would not cause 
 intelligent lovers of Shakespeare to wish 
 that " Hamlet " might never be degraded 
 by the glare of the footlights. Never- 
 theless, the impulse of the actor to cause 
 the play to be as obvious as possible has 
 wrought good results. The actor knows, 
 what our critics do not seem always to 
 know, that no accomplished playwright 
 wants to obscure the processes or the ob- 
 jects of his drama, or to convert an act- 
 ing play into an elusive study as Orphic 
 as one of Richard Strauss's symphonic 
 poems. He may, and he generally does, 
 neglect every other character in the play, 
 to round out that of the Prince ; but at 
 his worst he must regard the action as 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 153 
 
 well as the words. His consciousness 
 of an audience that does not care to think 
 forces him to present effectively what the 
 student in his closet refines, re-refines, 
 and over-refines. Hamlet, with him, 
 is a man, not a mind divorced from a 
 man, and he has not such a superstitious 
 regard for the text that he will allow 
 words to stand, merely as words which 
 have no meaning, if not illumined by 
 gesture or facial expression. The actor 
 makes mistakes at times : in his passion 
 for effects, he overleaps truth, as when, 
 after the death of Polonius, he weeps 
 and groans in most unprincely fashion. 
 Hamlet says: 
 
 For this same lord 
 I do repent : but heaven hath pleased it so. 
 To punish me with this and this with me. 
 That I must be their scourge and minister. 
 
 At the end of this most dramatic 
 scene Hamlet "drags in the body of 
 Polonius,"^ the Queen hurrying away 
 by another door. The actor who should 
 coolly and cruelly obey the stage direction 
 would bring upon himself the hisses of 
 
 1 ** Exeunt severally ; Hamlet dragging in the body of 
 Polonius.'' 
 
154 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 the auditors and destroy all sympathy for 
 Hamlet, unless it is presumed that he 
 had suddenly become insane. The text 
 of the interview between Hamlet and his 
 mother ought to render that supposition 
 out of the question, although Gertrude, 
 horrified by the effect of the Ghost's 
 appearance on her son, says : 
 
 This is the very coinage of your brain : 
 This bodiless creation ecstasy 
 Is very cunning in. 
 
 She does not see her husband, Ham- 
 let's father, "in his habit as he lived," 
 come to hold the Prince, by the bonds 
 of love, to his " almost blunted purpose." 
 " Taint not thy mind," the spirit of the 
 King — suffering, unpurged of crimes, not 
 great in the eyes of men, but foul before 
 the purity of God — has said. And now, 
 not as a king, not as an outraged patriot 
 seeing with clear eyes that sin is corrupt- 
 ing Denmark, and that the roots of the 
 cancer must be torn out by Hamlet, but 
 as a suppliant for the soul of the Queen, 
 he comes. That the " illusion " was no 
 illusion in the modern sense is shown 
 by the stage direction in the First Folio, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 155 
 
 "Enter the Ghost." That the Ghost 
 was no hallucination in the beginning 
 of the play, Shakespeare takes pains to 
 prove by the testimony of the soldiers, 
 and, more convincing than all, by the 
 evidence of the clear-minded Horatio. 
 As Hamlet was not mad, the dragging 
 in of Polonius could not have been the 
 only business set down for Hamlet after 
 the exit of his mother ; and " severally " 
 is not sufficiently definite. 
 
 The actor whose instinct is true sees 
 this, and supplies the business to save the 
 situation. At times he is intemperate, — 
 there have been actors who grovelled at the 
 feet of Polonius and howled with grief in 
 the most unprincely manner and unphilo- 
 sophical fashion. The student does not, 
 as a rule, weep at all or conceive that 
 Hamlet could have wept. He takes the 
 text as it stands, and Hamlet, instead of 
 for the moment assuming a coldness that 
 he does not feel to impress the Queen 
 with the surety of his purpose, becomes 
 brutal in madness. Much of the text 
 of Shakespeare, which seems inconsistent 
 and is therefore held to have deep and 
 even occult meaning by isolated students, 
 
156 THE GHOST- IN HAMLET 
 
 simply needs the theatrical business — 
 not set down in the stage Folio or the 
 Quarto — to be clear and consistent. In 
 minor passages this is very plain. For 
 instance, in the First Act, when the Ghost 
 passes, and Horatio cries out, — 
 
 I '11 cross it, though it blast me, 
 
 the business explanatory of this is differ- 
 ently interpreted by actors, and though 
 great play is made with the cross-handles 
 of the swords in the swearing scene, the 
 usual method is for Horatio merely to 
 cross the path of the Ghost. The 
 famous romantic player, Fechter, made 
 the sign of the cross, and, as the Ghost 
 did not flinch, — as it would have done 
 had it been an evil spirit, — he went on 
 with his truly Christian appeal to a spirit 
 in a process of purgation : 
 
 If there be any good thing to be done. 
 That may to thee do ease and grace to mc. 
 Speak to me : 
 
 If thou art privy to thy country's fate. 
 Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, 
 O, speak ! 
 
 What the actor of the Ghost did in 
 Shakespeare's time, we have no means 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 157 
 
 of knowing. The business accompany- 
 ing Hamlet's 
 
 Look here, upon this picture, and on this, 
 
 is not even so important, yet it is some- 
 times a piece of very gross exaggeration. 
 It will never be possible for an actor to 
 insert the business in the grave-diggers' 
 scene, as described by M. de la Baume 
 Desdossat, when he said that the author 
 " fait jouer a la boule avec des tetes de mort 
 sur le theatre." The bowling with death's 
 heads on the stage might easily be intro- 
 duced to exemplify Hamlet's allusion to 
 the old game of "loggats" by the perform- 
 ers who wanted to accentuate the Gothic 
 and grim humor of the clowns. Knight 
 smiles at the statement of the exquisite 
 M. Desdossat, and yet some of the busi- 
 ness introduced by the theatrical grave- 
 diggers is not less grotesque ; and who 
 can conclude that it is really out of 
 keeping in the awful contrast Shake- 
 speare makes ? There is, as I have said, 
 the evidence of no prompters' books to 
 the contrary. The taste of the time is the 
 only limit one can set to the grotesque 
 in Shakespeare or in any author of his 
 
158 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 period. It is evident from the text that 
 the spirit of Shakespeare is against exag- 
 geration of any kind, and the taste of our 
 time is with his. The actor of to-day 
 runs a great risk when, as Laertes, he 
 stands over the body of Ophelia, satu- 
 rated with the water of the pool and 
 bound by clinging plants, and says : 
 
 Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, 
 
 And therefore I forbid my tears : but yet 
 
 It is our trick ; nature her custom holds. 
 
 Let shame say what it will : when these are gone. 
 
 The woman will be out. 
 
 Often these lines are omitted, and with 
 reason. The actor is on delicate ground 
 in uttering what, in our time, seems a 
 bombastic exaggeration. We cannot tell 
 whether Shakespeare softened his rhetoric 
 by business. At any rate, we can be sure 
 that the lines were delivered under Shake- 
 speare's direction, so that they could in 
 no way interfere with the pathos of the 
 moment. The modesty of nature seems 
 to be outraged by them, as they stand in 
 cold print; but who can say that, from 
 the actor's point of view, — which was 
 also Shakespeare's, — they were not so \ 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 159 
 
 presented that even to-day they would 
 not have offended our taste? In most^ 
 of our modern plays every direction is 
 carefully written ; no doubt is left by the 
 author in the mind of the reader as to 
 the exact position of any character at 
 any given time on the stage. But these 
 minute directions do not appear in the 
 reading edition of the play, — though, 
 as a rule, the literary quality of modern 
 plays is so poor that nobody cares to read 
 them. They are arranged for the stage, 
 and when they disappear from the stage, 
 their value likewise disappears. They 
 exist, like the score of an opera by 
 Verdi, or a symphony of Beethoven, 
 only when they are interpreted. 
 
 Shakespeare's meaning suffers when his 
 plays are read as if they were intended 
 merely to be read. A poet of the first 
 class, and, consequently, a transfigurer of 
 life, an interpreter of the fundamentals and 
 universals of human character, he chose 
 the form of expression most adapted to 
 the feeling and taste of his time. It has 
 been noticed many times that the limita- 
 tions of the Elizabethan playhouse forced 
 him to adopt a method more akin to that 
 
i6o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 of the modern novelist than that of the 
 modern playwright. His characters tell 
 us, in their speeches, many things of local 
 and temporal import which, in the modern 
 play, are indicated, through the change 
 in the theatrical apparatus, to the sight. 
 The Queen's description of the death of 
 Ophelia, and the poetic expression of 
 Jacques's reveries would be mere " words, 
 words, words," to the theatrical writer of 
 the present day, who uses words in order 
 to make pictures as seldom as possible. 
 When Gower enters, at the beginning of 
 the fifth act of " Pericles," he asks the 
 auditors to do what the novelist often 
 asks his readers to do, — to " make be- 
 lieve," to " suppose." 
 
 In your supposing once more put your sight 
 Of heavy Pericles ; think this his bark : 
 Where what is done in action, more, if might. 
 Shall be discovered ; please you, sit and hark. 
 
 The audience of to-day neither " sup- 
 poses " nor " sits and harks." It sits 
 and sees. Shakespeare could not adapt 
 his plays to the modern theatre without 
 destroying their literary value. At the 
 same time they would have lost their 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS i6i 
 
 power of appeal to the folk of his time, 
 were they literature only, and not dumb 
 show, at times, and very vigorous action 
 as well. 
 
 The characters of Regan and Goneril 
 in " King Lear " seem to be monsters of 
 evil without any attractive traits. They 
 are so wicked that many lovers of Shake- 
 speare have classed them as theatrical 
 puppets created as foils to Cordelia. And 
 it must be confessed that the bare text 
 gives this impression, for there are few 
 phrases concerning them that suggest to 
 the imagination that they are more than 
 twin creatures wedded, unhumanly, to 
 sin. Edmund, too, seems unhuman, — 
 a mind of lust and lawlessness, a pawn of 
 the author's to bring out one of the em- 
 phatic lessons of the play, that sin blinds 
 us to the truth, — that both Lear and 
 Gloucester suffered because, wedded to 
 their pet sins, their minds had grown so 
 darkened that they could not distinguish 
 truth from falsehood. But neither Regan 
 nor Goneril is a mere puppet. Regan 
 and Goneril differ in attributes. Albany 
 calls Goneril "a gilded serpent"; and 
 on this hint the actor should build. 
 
i62 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Goneril and Regan are too often treated 
 as evil twins, in no way different except 
 in their love for Edmund. As for 
 Edmund, he is most dependent on the 
 actor ; the text is full of subtle hints, not 
 always considered by either the reader or 
 the personator. Edgar says : 
 
 The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
 Make instruments to plague us : 
 The dark and vicious place where thee he got 
 Cost him his eyes. 
 
 And Edmund replies : 
 
 Thou hast spoken right, 't is true ; 
 The vv'heel is come full circle ; I am here. 
 
 Dying, Edmund goes back, in triumph, 
 to his sin again : 
 
 Yet Edmund was beloved : 
 The one the other poison' d for my sake. 
 And after slew herself. 
 
 Edmund is a character created for the 
 actor, and it requires all the art of artful 
 actors to interpret his subtlety. The 
 puzzle-questions as to Edmund — Is he 
 an atheist ? Is he not a mere creature 
 of circumstances ^ — become quite plain 
 when Edmund appears in flesh and blood, 
 with a will to choose Nature as his goddess. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 163 
 
 and a belief, at least, in nature's law. lago 
 himself, a self-degraded and super-subtle 
 soul, is, too, human only in the actor's 
 hands. His plottings, read in cold blood, 
 on the printed page, make him seem to be 
 simply a devil, sojourning for a time on 
 earth in human form. 
 
 On the other hand, the theatre has 
 a way of being careful in minor details, 
 which are often stifling to the imagi- 
 nation, and careless in more important 
 things not considered in a certain class 
 of modern novels. A manager who 
 prides himself on the minutiae of a gon- 
 dola in "The Merchant of Venice" or 
 on the fidelity to detail in the view of 
 a Venetian street in " Othello " will cut 
 out those most important lines in the 
 speech of the Ghost in "Hamlet," — 
 
 Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled. 
 
 They seem unimportant to the reader 
 of Shakespeare who cannot conceive — 
 being without present knowledge of his- 
 torical data — their terrible meaning : 
 
 Unhousel'd, disappointed, unaneled. 
 No reckoning made, but sent to my account 
 With all my imperfections on my head : 
 O, horrible ! O, horrible ! most horrible ! 
 
i64 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The spirit's heart-wrung exclamation is 
 that he died without the last sacraments, 
 disappointed of his rights as a Christian, 
 unshriven, without extreme unction. The 
 statement affects Hamlet terribly ; we 
 learn it later in the play. Hamlet broods 
 on it, and he does not keep in mind that 
 the Ghost is not a lost soul, though 
 suffering the pains of purgation ; that he 
 thinks only of those pains we know 
 well from his soliloquy over the praying 
 Claudius. Less archaeology and more 
 art, less attention to the conditions of 
 minds in the play, would do away with 
 the aspersion that the theatre, in the 
 United States at least, has no historical 
 sense. 
 
 The accent laid by the spirit of the 
 elder Hamlet on his loss of the rites 
 of the Church had its value, we may 
 be sure, to the auditors in the Globe 
 Theatre. It has its value to-day, not 
 only to persons who have the historical 
 sense, but to many who can see — 
 whether we admit that Shakespeare's 
 conception of the Ghost was strictly 
 theological or not — that he realized what 
 was meant by the cutting off of a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 165 
 
 Christian soul from its rights. Again, the 
 Polonius of the modern theatre is a cross 
 between a knave and a fool. It is true 
 that Hamlet calls him a fool, but Hamlet 
 in his fits of passion is not to be trusted. 
 His picture of his uncle, for instance, — 
 " Hyperion to a satyr," — and his under- 
 rating the qualities of a courageous, cool, 
 highly intellectual, but deliberately bad 
 man, as Claudius was, ought to show the 
 representators that Hamlet's estimate of 
 Polonius should be taken only as the 
 estimate of an overwrought, almost mad- 
 dened, and supersensitive soul. Polonius 
 was shrewd, capable of deep thought, 
 cultured, after the older fashion of the 
 Euphuists ; and a closer study of the 
 influences that made him possible would 
 prevent the actors or the managers from 
 misrepresenting his creator's idea. 
 
 In the Prologue of the first act of 
 Henry V, when Shakespeare despairs of 
 crowding the splendid pageant of Agin- 
 court into the theatre, he exclaims against 
 the limits of the stage : 
 
 Can this cockpit hold 
 The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram 
 Within this wooden O the very casques 
 
i66 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 That did affright the air at Agincourt ? 
 O, pardon ! since a crooked figure may- 
 Attest in little place a million ; 
 And let us, ciphers to this great accompt. 
 On your imaginary forces work. 
 Suppose within the girdle of these walls 
 Are now confined two mighty monarchies. 
 Whose high upreared and abutting fronts 
 The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder : 
 Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; 
 Into a thousand parts divide one man. 
 And make imaginary puissance : 
 Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them 
 Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth. 
 
 As a rule, Shakespeare adapts his 
 dramas to the bounds of his theatrical 
 world without any evident dissatisfaction 
 with them. In fact, if his means of 
 satisfying the sight had been greater, our 
 pleasure in reading his plays would have 
 been less. 
 
 No better example can be found in 
 " Hamlet " of the loss the student suffers 
 from the absence of the business used 
 by the actors in the days of Elizabeth 
 and James than in the first scene of the 
 third act. Hamlet has unveiled his 
 doubtful mind, and suddenly he sees 
 Ophelia. A flood of sudden tenderness 
 sweeps over his heart; 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 167 
 
 Soft you now ! 
 The fair Ophelia ! Nymph, in thy orisons 
 Be all my sins remember' d. 
 
 It almost seems as if the wide-spread 
 delusion that Hamlet is really mad were 
 founded mainly on this scene ; for here, 
 unless some adequate reason for his sus- 
 picion of Ophelia's truth could be given 
 to the auditors, he seems to be not only 
 mad, but possessed of a brutal and sullen 
 devil. It is enough for the close student 
 of the play to believe, after careful com- 
 parison of various parts of the text, that 
 Hamlet had come to distrust all women, 
 and that he was vowed to " wjLpe away 
 all trivial fond records '' ; but it is not 
 enough for the average auditor, and we 
 may be sure that there was some busi- 
 ness arranged to explain obviously the 
 Prince's outburst of wrath, after a mo- 
 ment, too, of extreme tenderness. The 
 stage direction is simply " Exeunt King 
 and Polonius." But where do they go 
 for their " lawful espials " ? Behind the 
 arras ? Into a gallery at the back of a 
 room in the castle? The author sees 
 that their presence must be made known 
 to Hamlet, in order that he may have 
 
i68 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 an excuse for acting the part of madness 
 with such brutality. He must have some 
 plain proof that Ophelia is playing upon 
 him for the benefit of her father, and the 
 anditors, according to the usage of the 
 stage, must know that he has this proof; 
 therefore it is the custom, in many stage 
 presentments of the play, to reveal acci- 
 dentally, for a moment, the presence of 
 the King and Polonius. The insults of 
 Hamlet — excusable only in a madman 
 or one feigning madness — are directed 
 then, not at the fair and gentle Ophelia, 
 but at the listeners. 
 
 "I did love you once," he says with 
 a breaking voice, and he adds, remember- 
 ing, " I loved you not." 
 
 " I was the more deceived," Ophelia 
 answers gently. 
 
 Then Hamlet, fearing his own weak- 
 ness, frightens Ophelia with his accusations 
 against himself. Her gentle face appeals 
 to him, and he puts her to the test : 
 
 " Where *s your father? " 
 
 " At home, my lord." 
 
 With the sensitive instinct of love, his 
 face has read in Ophelia's that she is 
 deceiving him. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 169 
 
 There is no relenting after that. He 
 loves her still, but he knows that she has 
 deceived him. To the winds he flings 
 his wrath ; the listeners must beheve him 
 mad, and she — " Frailty, thy name is 
 woman.'* 
 
 Considered as a play, treated as intel- 
 ligent actors who desired simply to bring 
 out its meaning would treat it, " Hamlet*' 
 ceases to be a puzzle. It must be 
 remembered, however, that, until the 
 historical sense is cultivated in the thea- 
 tres, light thrown on certain passages by 
 the actor's instinct and insight will not 
 pierce other passages equally worthy of 
 illumination. 
 
THE GREATEST OF SHAKE- 
 SPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES 
 
THE GREATEST OF SHAKE- 
 SPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES 
 
 IT is not strange that American and 
 English writers of plays should seize 
 their material as they do, but it is 
 amazing that our modern dramatists 
 should appropriate with so little discre- 
 tion. While every tyro in the dramatic 
 art rushes to Feuillet and Dumas for sit- 
 uations and motives, and forgotten com- 
 edies written when Mademoiselle Fargueil 
 was in her prime are dismembered by 
 the scissors of the modern dramatist, 
 Lope de Vega and Calderon, who left 
 innumerable treasures, and later Spanish 
 dramatists of great merit are neglected. 
 As the rage for play-writing is now at 
 its height, the seeker after dramatic situa- 
 tions would do well to drop his search 
 for French novelties and turn his atten- 
 tion toward that magnificent national out- 
 growth of the most magnificent nation 
 of Europe, the Spanish drama. Beside 
 
174 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 it French dramatic art is stilted and 
 colorless; "Faust" loses much, because 
 it eternally questions and never answers ; 
 Greek dramatic art, individual and strong, 
 does not dwarf it; for Calderon, the 
 greatest dramatic poet of Spain, lacked 
 only the humor of Shakespeare to have 
 been the greatest dramatic poet of the 
 world. 
 
 The political revolt of Henry VIII did 
 for a time much intellectual harm to all of 
 us who have inherited the English tongue, 
 by narrowing our literary sympathies. 
 Sectarian narrowness caused Calderon to 
 be only a name, more or less connected 
 with the Inquisition, and consequently 
 disreputable, and made us content with 
 a small portion of the glorious inheri- 
 tance which Catholic Spain has left us. 
 It would be absurd to claim that Cal- 
 deron was a poet because he was a Cath- 
 olic, but it is certain that Dante and he 
 would never have been great poets had 
 they not been Catholics. They were 
 glorious flowers blooming at the end of 
 a glorious Summer. Around them were 
 the tinted leaves of decay which hid in 
 false splendor the track of death ; their 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 175 
 
 roots were not nourished by the sun-dried 
 soil around them ; they struck, deeper and 
 were vivified by eternal springs. The 
 influences about them would have made 
 Dante a weaver of conceits, and Calderon 
 an inventor of court spectacles. Medi- 
 aeval Christianity strengthened their in- 
 spiration. As Emerson has it : 
 
 The litanies of nations came. 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flame. 
 Up from the burning cave below — 
 The canticles of love and woe ; 
 The hand that rounded Peter's dome. 
 And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity : 
 Himself from God he could not free. 
 
 God, the Trinity, our Lord, true God 
 and true man. His blessed Mother, and 
 the saints, are always with Calderon. 
 The teaching of the Church was the 
 pivot upon which all his world swung ; 
 her life filled his heart and soul. Hu- 
 manity might ask questions and nature 
 present problems, but Calderon always 
 found their answer and solution in relig- 
 ion. It is this characteristic of the great 
 Spanish poet which causes Frederick 
 Schlegel to exclaim : " In this great and 
 
176 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 divine master the enigma of life is not 
 only expressed but solved." But the 
 Schlegels were smitten with that Calderon 
 fever against which Goethe protested, and 
 their indiscriminate praise has done his 
 reputation as much harm as the coldness, 
 prejudice, and ignorance of Sismondi and 
 Hallam. Hallam, however, was only 
 ignorant of Calderon's real merit, while 
 Sismondi was evidently prejudiced. It 
 may seem ridiculous, but it seems never- 
 theless true, that if the fact that Dante 
 put popes into the inferno had not given 
 the Italian master a piquant flavor, he 
 would not have become so well known 
 among us. Even Dean Trench, who has 
 written a valuable and sympathetic essay 
 on Calderon, approaches his " autos," or 
 religious dramas, hesitatingly, and, broad- 
 minded as the Dean is, he constantly 
 offers apologies to his prejudices by care- 
 fully explaining that he does not admire 
 Calderon's " Romanism.*' After having 
 made this plain he says : " And it is not 
 too much to say of the greater number of 
 these marvellous compositions that they 
 are hymns of loftiest praise to redeeming 
 love, summonses to all things which have 
 
AND OTFTER ESSAYS 177 
 
 breath to praise the Lord ; and he, too, 
 that writes, writes as one that has seen 
 Satan fall like lightning from heaven, and 
 rejoices in spirit with his Lord." 
 
 Calderon's " autos " were the perfection 
 of the miracle-play, or " mystery,'* which 
 was the national drama of Spain. With 
 the skill of a trained dramatist (he was 
 manager of the court theatre in the palace 
 of the Buen Retiro) and the insight of a 
 poet, he seized the parables of the Scrip- 
 tures, the doctrines of the Church, the 
 religious legends of the people, and even 
 the heathen myths, and wrought them 
 into these " autos " for the salvation of 
 his countrymen. They might, indeed, 
 rather be called moralities than mysteries. 
 Every incident is arranged with almost 
 mathematical precision, to the end that 
 a moral may be taught. Lope de Vega, 
 Calderon's predecessor, had done much 
 to elevate the stage of the people ; but 
 Calderon, at once priest and dramatist, 
 found both his vocations joined in the 
 composition of his " autos." He could 
 preach his sermons more effectively to 
 the eye than to the ear. The Germans 
 recognized the genius of Calderon with 
 
178 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 great cordiality, and Schiller regretted 
 that he had not read him in earlier life. 
 For a long time the only translations of 
 any of these " autos " were in German. 
 Until Denis Florence MacCarthy Eng- 
 lished the " Sorceries of Sin " none of the 
 "autos" of Calderon had appeared in an 
 English garb. Dean Trench had given 
 an analysis of " The Great Theatre of the 
 World," and several scenes, and Mr. 
 Ticknor and others had given analyses 
 of '' autos " ; " but," as Mr. MacCarthy 
 says in his introduction to " The Sorce- 
 ries," " the ' autos,* the most wonderful 
 of all his productions, and the only ones, 
 with but two exceptions, which the great 
 poet himself thought worthy of revision, 
 have been passed over, I may say, in 
 almost utter silence." 
 
 The Germans, enthusiastic as they have 
 shown themselves over the secular plays 
 of Calderon, shrank from the task which 
 Mr. MacCarthy completed with such 
 thorough success. The characters in 
 " Los Encantos de la Culpa," which is 
 called a " sacramental allegorical auto," 
 are the Man, Sin, Voluptuousness, Flat- 
 tery, the Understanding, Penance, the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 179 
 
 Smell, the Hearing, the Touch, the Taste, 
 musicians, and chorus. The scene opens 
 to the sound of the trumpet. A ship is 
 discovered at sea. In it are the Man, 
 the Understanding, and the Five Senses. 
 The Understanding warns the Man that 
 he is afloat on the world's wide sea and 
 that a mighty tempest threatens him. 
 The Senses then declare their characters, 
 and act the part of the crew during the 
 tempest, with wonderful dramatic spirit. 
 The character of the play and its motive, 
 in the hands of so religious a poet as 
 Calderon, may be gathered from the title 
 and the names of the dramatis persons. 
 But no analysis could do justice to the 
 originality, the beauty, the simplicity, 
 and the intense dramatic quality of this 
 poetical drama. In this "auto" as in 
 several others, Calderon uses the Greek, 
 mythology in a manner which shows his 
 skill and his deep religious feeling. His 
 fervor fuses the Christian religion and 
 the myths, so that their pagan character 
 is entirely lost. In the hands of a poet 
 like Camoens the myths, mingled with 
 Christian personages and symbols, pro- 
 duce a grotesque and profane effect. 
 
i8o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Calderon seizes them boldly, as if by the 
 divine right of a Christian. He illumines 
 the faces of the gods with a new glory ; 
 he causes the pipe of Pan to join in the 
 heavenly chorus, and makes Orpheus, 
 whose music gives a new sense to the 
 beasts, a figure of our Lord. "The 
 True God Pan " is the title of one ; an- 
 other is founded on the story of Cupid 
 and Psyche, and another on Ulysses 
 and Circe. Most of his " autos " rest, 
 however, on a Scriptural basis, such as 
 "The Vineyard of the Lord," "The 
 Wheat and the Tares," and "The Hid 
 Treasures " ; others on Old Testament 
 facts — " The Brazen Serpent," " Gid- 
 eon's Fleece," " The Sheaves of Ruth," 
 and " Balthasar's Feast " ; others, while 
 strictly moral, are somewhat less Scrip- 
 tural, — for instance, " Love the Greatest 
 Enchantment " and " The Sorceries of 
 Sin " are Christian dramatic allegories, 
 both founded on the myth of Ulysses 
 and Circe. 
 
 The richness of imagery, the wealth 
 of fancy, and the firmness of grasp which 
 the poet shows in working out these 
 marvellous acts make each a precious 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS i8i 
 
 heritage to poetry as well as to dramatic 
 art. They are unique, and they merit 
 a thorough study. A Catholic alone can 
 sympathize with their spirit and revel in 
 the deep religious life which fills them. 
 A speech of Penance to Sin in *' Los 
 Encantos de la Culpa " will give an idea 
 of the beauty of the drama. This pas- 
 sage loses nothing of its beauty in Mr. 
 MacCarthy's interpretation : 
 
 I, 
 
 Erst who wore the rainbow's dress. 
 Who if in a car triumphal 
 Thou to-day behold' st me seated 
 'Neath a canopy, wherein 
 Purple, pearl, and gold are blended, 
 'Tis because I come to triumph 
 Over thee ; for whensoever 
 Calleth me Man's Understanding, 
 Never is the call neglected. 
 All the virtues which he squandered 
 In his ignorance demented 
 I have here regathered, since 
 Certain 'tis that when presented 
 By the hand of Grace they 've been. 
 He who turneth back repentant 
 Ever findeth them again. 
 Safely guarded and preserved. 
 And that Man may know that they 
 Can alone thy sorceries render 
 Powerless, thou wilt now behold 
 
i82 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 All the viands here collected 
 
 Vanish into air, and leave 
 
 Naught behind to tell their presence ; 
 
 Showing thus how human glory 
 
 Is as false as evanescent. 
 
 Since the only food that lasteth 
 
 Is the food for souls intended — 
 
 Is the eternal Bread of Life 
 
 Which now fills this table's centre. 
 
 It is Penance that presents it. 
 
 Since without her (naught more certain) 
 
 Man deserveth not to witness 
 
 So much glory manifested. 
 
 Yet, ye Senses, 'tis not bread. 
 
 But a substance most transcendent : 
 
 It is Flesh and Blood ; because 
 
 When the substance is dissevered 
 
 From the species, the White Host (^Hostu 
 
 bianco) then 
 But the accidents preserveth. 
 
 Sin. How canst thou expect to gain 
 Credence from thy outraged Senses, 
 When they come to understand 
 How you wrong them and offend them ? 
 Smell, come here, and with thy sense 
 Taste this bread, this substance ; tell me. 
 Is it bread or flesh ? 
 
 ( The Senses approach, ) 
 
 The Smell. Its smell 
 Is the smell of bread. 
 
 Sin. Taste, enter. Try it thou. 
 
 The Taste. Its taste is plainly 
 That of bread. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 183 
 
 Sin. Touch, come. Why tremble ? 
 Say what 's this thou touchest ? 
 
 The Touch. Bread. 
 
 Sin. Sight, declare what thou discernest 
 In this object. 
 
 7'he Sight. Bread alone. 
 
 Sin. Hearing, thou, too, break in pieces 
 This material, which, as fle§h. 
 Faith proclaims and Penance preacheth ; 
 Let the fraction, by its noise. 
 Of their error undeceive them. 
 Say, is it so ? 
 
 Tbe Hearing. Ungrateful Sin, 
 Though the noise in truth resembles 
 That of bread when broken, yet 
 Faith and Penance teach us better 
 It is flesh, and what they call it 
 I believe : that Faith asserteth 
 Aught is proof enough thereof. 
 
 The Understanding. This one reason brings 
 contentment 
 Unto me. 
 
 Penance. O Man ! why linger. 
 Now that hearing hath firm fettered 
 To the Faith thy Understanding ? 
 Quick ! regain the saving vessel 
 Of the Sovereign Church, and leave 
 Sin's so briefly sweet excesses. 
 Thou, Ulysses, Circe's slave. 
 Fly this false and fleeting revel. 
 Since how great her power may be. 
 Greater is the power of Heaven, 
 And the true Jove's mightier magic 
 Will thy virtuous purpose strengthen. 
 
i84 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The Man. Yes, thou 'rt right, O Understanding! 
 Lead in safety hence my Senses. 
 
 All. Let us to our ship ; for here 
 All is shadowy and unsettled. 
 
 Sin. What imports it, woe is me ! — 
 What imports it that my sceptre 
 Thus you seem to 'scape from, since 
 My enchantments will attend you ? 
 I shall rouse the waves to madness. 
 
 Penance. I shall follow and appease them. 
 
 {Trumpets peal. The ship is discover edy and all 
 go on board.') 
 
 The "auto" ends with the triumph 
 of Penance over the enchantments of 
 Circe, and, this new Ulysses having 
 escaped, the dramatis persons sing: 
 
 Let this mightiest miracle 
 
 Over all the world be feted. 
 
 Specially within Madrid, 
 
 City where Spain's proud heart swelleth. 
 
 Which, in honoring God's body. 
 
 Takes the foremost place for ever. 
 
 In another "auto," "The Great The- 
 atre of the World," Calderon takes for 
 his theme, 
 
 En el teatro del mundo 
 Todos son representados, 
 
 which Shakespeare had already rendered: 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 185 
 
 All the world 's a stage. 
 And all the men and women merely players. 
 
 In the beginning the author summons his 
 people, the Rich Man, the Beggar, the 
 King, the Husbandman, the Beauty, the 
 Hermit, or Discretion, and the Infant. 
 They receive their parts from him, with 
 the words. 
 
 Act your best, for God is God, 
 
 and a sublime drama of life goes on. 
 Dean Trench ^ has given an interesting 
 analysis of this " auto," to which we refer 
 the reader who is too indolent to rub up 
 his Spanish. 
 
 Calderon was born in 1600, either in 
 the beginning of January or February, 
 although his friend Vera Tassis makes 
 the year of his birth 1601. " Los Hijos 
 de Madrid" (Calderon first saw the light 
 in Madrid) gives February 14, 1600, as 
 the day of his baptism. Another work 
 quoted by Dean Trench, " Obelisco Fu- 
 nebre," states, on the authority of the poet 
 himself, that he was born January 17, 
 1600. His parents, according to the 
 
 1 Calderon, by R. C. Trench. 
 
i86 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 chronicles of the time, were Christian and 
 prudent people, who, being of illustrious 
 lineage, gave their children an education 
 in conformity with it. His father held a 
 State office under PhiHp II and Philip III. 
 Don Pedro, the poet, was the youngest 
 of four children. His brother Diego 
 succeeded to the family estate, his sister 
 entered the Order of St. Clare, and Jose 
 fell in battle in 1645. -^^ learned the 
 rudiments in the Jesuit College of Ma- 
 drid. Afterwards he studied — some bi- 
 ographers say for five years — philosophy 
 and theology at the famous University of 
 Salamanca. No one can read any play 
 of Calderon's without being impressed 
 with the deeply religious bent of his mind, 
 and with the evidence of theological study 
 which each of them displays. To the 
 Summa of St. Thomas he owed all that cer- 
 tainty and firmness in grasping the great 
 questions of life which was the despair 
 of Schiller and the admiration of Goethe. 
 Well might Augustus Schlegel, who, un- 
 like his brother Frederick, had not ac- 
 cepted the Church, exclaim: "Blessed 
 man ! he had escaped from the wild 
 labyrinths of doubt into the stronghold 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 187 
 
 of belief; thence, with undisturbed tran- 
 quillity of soul, he beheld and portrayed 
 the storms of the world. To him human 
 life was no longer a dark riddle." 
 
 When the crown fell from Shake- 
 speare's dying head in England, Calderon 
 had scarcely begun to sing in Spain. He 
 lived to pass the threescore and ten allot- 
 ted to man by eleven years. While the 
 drama degenerated into spectacular and 
 intellectually valueless shows in Spain, 
 it likewise degenerated in England into 
 the bastard, the soulless, the heartless 
 comedy of the Restoration. He Hved 
 to see the Spanish theatre, which he had 
 built, following Lope de Vega, to a most 
 noble height, become a mere vehicle for 
 tours de force of scenic effects. And he 
 does not seem to have been conscious 
 of this degradation. He even helped it 
 along. 
 
 Nothing could have been more repel- 
 lent to his nature than the polished yet 
 open obscenity of the English comedies 
 in vogue in his latter years. He would 
 have been quick to perceive the evil 
 tendency of- the wit of Congreve and 
 Wycherley, and to raise his voice against 
 
i88 . THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 it ; but he failed to see that the splendid 
 spectacles which he offered to the eyes of 
 the court on the great pond of the Buen 
 Retiro were as ruinous to the intellectual 
 enjoyment of the drama as licentiousness 
 and frivolity. To the glory of this most 
 noble-minded of poets it must be said 
 that no double entente^ no vile allusion or 
 coarse pun such as Shakespeare felt him- 
 self too often bound to introduce, often 
 making of great passages " sweet bells 
 jangled," ever appears in the works of 
 Calderon. Yet Calderon was the bold- 
 est of dramatists — bolder, because purer 
 and without any self-conscious delight in 
 shocking his audience, than the boldest 
 of the French Romanticists. 
 
 " The Devotion of the Cross," a 
 powerful drama, contains scenes which 
 in a less firm and pure hand would have 
 left that sense of despair which we feel 
 at the end of a great Greek play when 
 the Fates have done their work. The 
 impression derived from Sismondi that 
 this sublime play turns on the crime of 
 incest is false ; and it is surprising that 
 even the most careless reader could have 
 failed to see that Eusebio and Julia, guilty 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 189 
 
 though they were, were saved from this 
 unutterable crime. And in the scene, as 
 translated by Mr. MacCarthy, in which 
 they are saved, the masterly character of 
 Calderon's art shows itself. It requires 
 the highest purity of purpose and the 
 aid of great genius to produce the effect 
 of horror on the spectator's mind — the 
 horror which the witness of a great crime 
 feels — without vulgarizing the intensity 
 of the horror or degrading the audience 
 by forcing them to sympathize momen- 
 tarily with the crime. 
 
 Another Spanish writer possessed this 
 high purpose and this art, though in her 
 case talent supplied the place of genius. 
 Readers of " La Gaviota " of Fernan 
 Caballero will remember instances of it. 
 It is easy to make an audience thrill with 
 sympathy for temptation, or crime which 
 is the result of passion, and the effects of 
 too many of the romantic dramatists have 
 been produced in this cheap way ; but it 
 is not easy to cause the sin to be abhorred 
 while the audience is still in sympathy 
 with those who are on the verge of com- 
 mitting it. Calderon, of all dramatists, 
 was master of the means of producing 
 
190 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 this effect. Pure as his intent always 
 was, and thoroughly Catholic as he every- 
 where shows himself to be, yet he did not 
 hesitate to touch the most secret springs 
 of passion. A skilful master of stage 
 tricks, he was never misled into vulgar 
 and easy effects. All his situations were 
 planned most artfully, nothing was left to 
 chance ; and consequently the interest lies 
 in the action of the drama, not in its 
 characters. Calderon was a court poet 
 and dramatist, and the result of habitual 
 contact with the members of the most 
 ceremonious and stately court in Europe 
 is often apparent in his plays. 
 
 It is, therefore, amusing to read Vol- 
 taire*s complaints of the natural and un- 
 cultivated nature of the Spanish drama ; 
 and Voltaire's opinion of the Spanish 
 drama is as valuable as his allusion to 
 Hamlet as "a drunken Dane." Nothing 
 could be more artificial than the structure 
 of Calderon's dramas. They are geomet- 
 rical in their precision ; some of them 
 seem to be founded on a scholastic for- 
 mula ; but nevertheless Calderon probes 
 the depth of the human heart and holds 
 in his discipHned hand the key to all the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 191 
 
 passions. French critics, always having 
 the reverence for their Louis Quatorze 
 imitations of the Greek drama before 
 their eyes, could not appreciate Calderon. 
 They found him too spontaneous, almost 
 savage, because his rules of dramatic art 
 differed from theirs. 
 
 Dean Trench quotes a critical opinion 
 from a book published in Paris in 1669, 
 " Journal de Voyage d'Espagne,*' in which 
 the complacent French traveller says : 
 " Yesterday came the Marquis of Eliche, 
 eldest son of Don Luis De Haro, and 
 Monsieur de Barriere, and took me to the 
 theatre. The play, which had been before 
 brought forward but was newly revived, was 
 naught, although it had Don Pedro Cal- 
 deron for author. At a later hour I made 
 a visit to this Calderon, who is held the 
 greatest poet and most illustrious genius 
 in Spain at the present day. He is knight 
 of the Order of Santiago and chaplain to 
 the Chapel of the Kings at Toledo ; but 
 I gathered from his conversation that his 
 head-piece was furnished poorly enough. 
 We disputed a good while on the rules 
 of the drama, which in this land are not 
 recognized, and about which the Spaniards 
 
192 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 make themselves merry." But the critic 
 of to-day, recalling how Calderon, in spite 
 of his strict rules and courtly elegance, 
 touched the hearts of the common people, 
 will differ from the French interviewer and 
 thank Heaven that this Spanish poet tri- 
 umphed over more hampering regulations 
 than ever bound Racine or Corneille. 
 
 The boldness with which he handled 
 his motifs and characters excited the ill 
 nature and reckless censure of Sismondi, 
 who finds in " The Devotion of the 
 Cross " much that would be, if it were 
 there, abominable. " On devine sans 
 peine que Julia est la soeur d'Eusebe ; 
 et cette invention dramatique augmen- 
 tant d'intensite irait coudoyer I'horreur et 
 rinsoutenable, si Calderon n'etait doue 
 de ce vrai genie dont I'essence est pure. 
 Nous allons le voir, dans une occasion 
 si difficile retrouver la moralite qui lui 
 est propre, la sublime pudeur qui ne 
 I'abandonne jamais. Ses ailes blanches 
 et vierges trempent dans Forage sans le 
 fletrir, et effleurent la foudre sans se 
 bruler.'* The truth of this last beautiful 
 sentence is often forced upon the reader. 
 The " white and spotless wings " of this 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 193 
 
 genius flutter amid darkness and storm 
 unsullied and unruffled. In a turmoil 
 of passion and jealousy, such as " Phy- 
 sician of his Own Honor/* of which there 
 is a French version, he remains calm and 
 pure while his hearers shudder with hor- 
 ror. His plays of which jealousy is the 
 theme seem to have been torn from a 
 living and burning heart. They are al- 
 most unendurably horrible, yet they are 
 wonders of dramatic art; and in the 
 warring of the elements Calderon never 
 changes his plan or loses his grasp. Either 
 the taste of the Spanish court was much 
 less coarse than that of the English, or 
 Calderon's elevating studies of the Summa 
 must have made him disdain low things ; 
 for although Cervantes and, it is said, the 
 pleasant farceur y Tirso de Molina, often 
 made allusions which in any age would 
 have been considered indecent, Calderon's 
 works are free from these blots. 
 
 Senor Hartzenbusch tells us that Cal- 
 deron was nineteen when he left Salamanca, 
 and surmises that " The Devotion of the 
 Cross " was written before he left the 
 University. In it he expresses the dif- 
 ficulty of pleasing an audience variously 
 13 
 
194 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 composed, in the speech beginning, 
 " Copla hay tambien para ti," etc. 
 
 Take this rhyme along with thee : 
 Since, howe'er the poet tries. 
 Doubtful is his drama's fate. 
 For what may the crowd elate 
 The judicious may despise. 
 If you 're seeking for fame's prizes. 
 Try some method less remote. 
 For 't is hard to cut a coat 
 That will suit all sorts of sizes. 
 
 Calderon did not despise the applause 
 of the populace because he wrote for the 
 approbation of the knights. He pleased 
 both. He interested the people, in spite 
 of themselves, in the heroism that the 
 Moors had displayed ; this was not the 
 least of his triumphs. " The Chariot of 
 Heaven," his first play, written when he 
 was fourteen, has not come down to us. 
 At the age of twenty-five we find him 
 serving in the Low Countries as a soldier, 
 as Cervantes and Garcilasso the lyric poet 
 and other Spanish writers had served. 
 In 1625 he was still in the army, if his 
 " Siege of Breda," a military drama, may 
 stand as evidence of his presence at the 
 taking of that town. Philip IV, a litterateur 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 195 
 
 and a lover of the drama, summoned 
 him to court. In 1630 Lope de Vega 
 acknowledged that his mantle had fallen 
 on the poet-soldier, and on Lope's death, 
 {ivQ years later, there was no one left 
 to dispute the bays with Calderon. Cal- 
 deron was a favorite at court. His lines 
 were cast in pleasant places. The light 
 of the courtly glare in which he lived did 
 not wither his genius ; it was good for 
 him ; he throve in the splendor, and 
 flourished. Unlike so many of his breth- 
 ren, he had no struggles with fate. The 
 spectacular pieces which his position as 
 director of the court theatre in the palace 
 of the Buen Retiro forced him to prepare 
 are the weakest and the most unsatisfac- 
 tory of his productions. 
 
 Ben Jonson's masques, which were fash- 
 ionable at the English court at this time, 
 were somewhat similar, but in som^ re- 
 spects more meritorious. Calderon, who 
 doubtless felt the arrangement of these 
 magnificent shows a heavy task, avenged 
 himself by torturing the stage machinist. 
 " Circe," which was represented on the 
 great pond of the Buen Retiro on St. 
 John's Night, 1635, ^^ accompanied with 
 
196 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 most elaborate directions which would 
 drive the very modern stage manager to 
 despair. Here is a sample : 
 
 "In the midst of this island will be situated 
 a very lofty mountain of rugged ascent, with 
 precipices and caverns, surrounded by a thick 
 and darksome wood of tall trees, some of which 
 will be seen to exhibit the appearance of the 
 human form covered with a rough bark, from 
 the heads and arms of which will issue green 
 boughs and branches, having suspended from 
 them, various trophies of war and of the chase, 
 the theatre, during the opening of the scene, 
 being scantily lit with concealed lights ; and, to 
 make a beginning of the festival, a murmuring 
 and a rippling noise of water having been heard, 
 a great and magnificent car will be seen to 
 advance along the pond, plated over with silver, 
 and drawn by two monstrous fishes, from whose 
 mouths will continually issue great jets of water, 
 the light of the theatre increasing according as 
 they advance ; and on the summit of it will be 
 seated in great pomp and majesty the goddess 
 Aqua, from whose head and curious vesture 
 will issue an infinite abundance of little con- 
 duits of water ; and at the same time will be 
 seen another great supply flowing from an urn 
 which the goddess will hold reversed, and which, 
 filled with a variety of fishes, that, leaping and 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 197 
 
 playing in the torrent as it descends and gliding 
 over all the car, will fall into the pond." 
 
 This is only a glimmer of the wonders 
 to follow. Calderon spared no expense 
 on these spectacles, and the king seems to 
 have been lavish in his expenditures for 
 adding decorations and mechanism of the 
 newest pattern to the paraphernalia of 
 the court theatre. Being a member of the 
 military order of Santiago, Calderon en- 
 tered the iield in 1637 to help to suppress 
 a revolt in one of the provinces. How 
 long he remained in the army is not cer- 
 tain ; it is plain, however, that Philip IV 
 preferred that he should remain at court. 
 He gave up the pursuit of arms, although 
 he still clung to that of literature, and 
 received holy orders. His genius was of 
 so sacred a kind that he needed not to 
 throw aside his pen to take up the cross. 
 His works were psalms, and he only 
 needed the added grace of the Christian 
 priesthood to make him a perfect sym- 
 bol of Catholic art. His life had been 
 calm and happy — or as calm and happy 
 as the life of such a man, whose eyes were 
 fixed on God and who knew no real 
 
198 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 contentment not seeing God, could be. 
 On Whitsunday, May 25, 168 1, he died, 
 no longer a court favorite, — for Philip 
 had died in 1665, — but revered and loved. 
 He was buried in the Church of San 
 Salvadore at Madrid. The glimpses 
 which we get of him from his contempora- 
 ries are few, but they make us feel that 
 his life was noble and that his works 
 reflected it. His relations with Lope de 
 Vega and Cervantes (he dramatized " Don 
 Quixote ") were friendly and cordial. 
 Not much is known of his ways among 
 men, but what is known shows him to be 
 a high type of a high and noble people. 
 
 With Calderon died the glory of Spain. 
 Lope de Vega had modelled the statue 
 out of rude stone, which Calderon had 
 completed. Out of the national life of 
 Spain had come the strong impulse which 
 gave a new drama to the world, to take 
 its place proudly beside the drama of 
 Greece and the drama of England ; which 
 gave a New World to the Old, and drew 
 from this New World those glittering 
 streams that gilded but could not revive 
 it. Materialism had hidden the cross and 
 dimmed the old Spanish ideal. The 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 199 
 
 gorgeous trappings of the body had 
 almost smothered the soul. Calderon 
 making spectacles for the court, while the 
 enemies of Spain were dismembering her, 
 and her soldiers in new lands sowing the 
 seeds of hatred in the name of God, 
 whom their lust outraged, was a symbol 
 of his country, forgetting the ideal of 
 other days and substituting for it empty 
 splendor and worthless gold. 
 
IMITATORS OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
IMITATORS OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 STUDENTS of literature are of one 
 mind, even in the face of the vogue 
 of Rostand's " Cyrano de Berge- 
 rac," Phillips's " Ulysses," and Shaw's 
 '' Candida," as to the evident decay of 
 the literary element in most of the plays 
 successfully performed at the theatres. 
 The French still listen with respect to the 
 masterpieces of Racine, Corneille, and 
 Moliere, but we must remember that the 
 Comedie Fran^atse is a subsidized theatre. 
 Moliere was, like Shakespeare, both a 
 man of letters and an actor. He knew 
 the turn of the literary phrase, but he 
 knew also how to give his phrase the 
 dramatic touch without which the most 
 splendid poetry fails echoless from the 
 stage. Shakespeare had the dramatic 
 power and the theatrical skill, and yet 
 so different were the requirements of 
 the Elizabethan stage from ours that no 
 modern manager except Mr. Ben Greet 
 
204 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 dares to put a play of Shakespeare's, for- 
 ward without various necessary changes, 
 and even he must " cut '* many lines. 
 Even so careful a manager as the late 
 Mr. Augustin Daly took out the fine 
 speech of the first lord in " As You 
 Like It " ^ because it impedes the action 
 of the play. Eloquence as eloquence, 
 poetry as poetry, does not count on the 
 modern stage. Words are no longer held 
 to be the principal symbols which the 
 dramatist must use for the presentation 
 of his ideas. It is the psychological value 
 of muscular expression — of action and 
 the suggestion of emotion — that he must 
 weigh. 
 
 He learns the value of the pause, of the 
 glance of the eye, of the trembling of the 
 hand, of the laugh, of the sob ; he gauges 
 the effect of silence itself; but for long 
 speeches, for soliloquies that are merely 
 eloquent or poetical, he has no use. 
 They will not do. You may argue that 
 this condition of affairs means degen- 
 eracy, and you will be met with Pro- 
 fessor Brander Matthews's reply, — that 
 the drama, as well as the other arts of 
 
 1 Act II, Sc. 1. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 205 
 
 sculpture and painting and music, ought 
 not to be judged from a literary point of 
 view. The dramatic quality may cause a 
 play to live for the hour, and only for the 
 hour; the literary quality gives it perma- 
 nence; it is this quality which makes it 
 eventually a classic. Professor Brander 
 Matthews says : 
 
 "Nobody disputes that dramatic literature 
 must be literature, although there are not a few 
 who do not insist that it must be dramatic. 
 The great dramatists have accepted this double 
 obligation, and they have always recognized that 
 the stage of the theatre, and not the desk of the 
 library, is the true proving room. This double 
 obligation it is that makes the drama so difficult 
 an art, perhaps, indeed, the most difficult of all 
 arts." 
 
 The great dramatists to whom Pro- 
 fessor Brander Matthews alludes are easily 
 enumerated, and they are very great in- 
 deed, — Calderon, Lope de Vega, Shake- 
 speare, Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Moliere, 
 and Goldsmith ; for Goldsmith in " She 
 Stoops to Conquer " has left us at least 
 one play that answers both the literary 
 and the dramatic tests. Scores of other 
 
2o6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 dramatists who held the theatre in their day 
 and delighted their fellows are forgotten. 
 Before the footlights their characters lived ; 
 in the book-shelves they are very like 
 the dried sea-weed, which takes on color 
 and life only in its congenial element. 
 Taken from the stage, they have no life, 
 no interest ; they are as dry as the dust in 
 which they repose. 
 
 On the other hand, there are scores of 
 brilliant dramas which live only in the let- 
 ter; which, although not written for the 
 closet, can be endured only in the study. 
 They contain the highest poetry, the most 
 thrilling eloquence ; they are talked about 
 rather than read. And when one hears a 
 line from them, one is rather certain to be 
 able to trace it to a dictionary of quota- 
 tions. And these noble works of poetic 
 art are forgotten, except as to their names, 
 because their authors were poets, but not 
 dramatists. The conditions of the stage 
 have changed, and Sophocles and Shake- 
 speare and Racine do not fit well in the 
 atmosphere of our modern theatre. The 
 method of Shakespeare, who is careful to 
 indicate locality and time and physical sur- 
 roundings in his text, is the method of 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 207 
 
 the modern novelist rather than of the 
 modern dramatist ; hence the necessity of 
 " adapting " him to the exigencies of the 
 modern theatre; just as a novel, no matter 
 how much essential dramatic quality there 
 may be in it, must be arranged for the stage. 
 The essential dramatic quality is impor- 
 tant, but an acting play must succeed or 
 fall through the presentment of the dra- 
 matic quality. " It is the vast power a 
 good actor has In this way," Sir Henry 
 Irving said, in his address before the Phil- 
 osophical Institute of Edinburgh, "which 
 has led the French to speak of creating 
 a part when they mean its first being 
 played ; and the French authors are so 
 conscious of the extent and value of this 
 cooperation of actors with them, that they 
 have never objected to the phrase, but, on 
 the contrary, are uniformly lavish in their 
 homage to the artists who have created 
 on the boards the parts which they them- 
 selves have created on paper." 
 
 The characters, then, are conceived by 
 the author ; they are grouped by him in 
 accordance v/ith the dramatic laws of logic 
 and movement ; but unless he knows these 
 laws, unless he can project himself Into the 
 
2o8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 minds of his auditors, unless he is sure 
 that contrast and action are his main tools, 
 he cannot succeed in making a drama for 
 the stage. He must be capable of per- 
 ceiving the dramatic worth of our knowl- 
 edge that Lady Teazle is behind the screen 
 in that marvellously constructed scene in 
 Sheridan's " School for Scandal " ; he can 
 leave nothing to chance, as Shakespeare 
 leaves nothing to chance in the trial scene 
 in "The Merchant of Venice"; but he 
 must leave much to interpretation. 
 
 On the other hand, the names of Shel- 
 ley, Sir tienry Taylor, Browning, Swin- 
 burne, and the two De Veres, must be 
 uttered by men of letters with respect ; and 
 yet they failed as dramatists. They pro- 
 duced " closet " dramas, — dramas invented 
 for a stage that does not exist, modelled on 
 Elizabethan forms, without the inner power 
 of appealing to the dramatic sense. As 
 dramas, " The Cenci " of Shelley, " A 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon," " Strafford," and 
 "Luria," of Browning, "Mary Stuart" 
 and " Chastelard " of Swinburne, " Philip 
 van Artevelde" and " Edwin the Fair" of 
 Sir Henry Taylor, the " Mary Tudor " of 
 Sir Aubrey de Vere, the " Alexander the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 209 
 
 Great " and " St. Thomas of Canterbury " 
 of Aubrey Thomas de Vere, the " Queen 
 Mary '* and " Becket " of Tennyson, are 
 " closet " dramas. To quote Mr. Craw- 
 ford's happy phrase, they are plays for a 
 "pocket theatre." Of all these great men 
 Tennyson made the most violent effort 
 to be theatrical, and a very great fail- 
 ure. '' Harold " and " Queen Mary " and 
 " Becket " are neither great poems nor 
 great dramas. Shelley's " Cenci," in spite 
 of the repellent subject, is a classic, — 
 beautiful, glowing, terrible. Browning's 
 " Strafford " and " Luria " and " A Blot 
 in the 'Scutcheon " are literature, but they 
 have not the acting quality ; they are 
 not objective. " His stage," Mr. Henry 
 Brown says, in " Browning as a Dramatic 
 Poet," "is filled with moral agents in a 
 state of moral tension, not with men and 
 women who are ilesh and blood as well 
 as spirit." Swinburne's tragedies are hard 
 reading, though full of eloquence and lyr- 
 ical quality, and the " Philip van Arte- 
 velde " of Sir Henry Taylor and " Mary 
 Tudor " of Sir Aubrey de Vere, have 
 some magnificent poetical passages, but 
 they lack every requirement for the acting 
 14 
 
210 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 play. "Richelieu" and "The Lady of 
 Lyons," though they hold the stage, are 
 not literature, nor is " Caste," or " Held 
 by the Enemy," or " The Way of the 
 World,"' or "The Henrietta," or "Ala- 
 bama," or " Shore Acres," or any of the 
 popular favorites ; but they are plays which 
 appeal to us as the orator appeals to us, — 
 for an hour or two, and then the fire dies 
 away. 
 
 Permit me to compare two plays written 
 by two very great poets, — Tennyson's 
 " Becker" and Aubrey Thomas de Vere's 
 " St. Thomas of Canterbury," to show 
 that the highest poetical quality will not 
 save a noble play from being of the 
 "closet," that is, study type, and that the 
 poet who tries to make a great subject 
 dramatic by lowering it to what he deems 
 to be the popular theatrical demand, fails. 
 Tennyson sacrificed the truth of history 
 and the truth of character in attempting 
 to theatricalize the character of Thomas 
 of Canterbury, with the consequence that, 
 if " Becket " and the dramas in which he 
 has followed a similar process were lost, 
 his reputation would be the better for it. 
 
 I Clyde Fitch. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 211 
 
 In picturesqueness and grace the 
 " Becket " of the late laureate is vastly 
 superior to the one which, after " Alexan- 
 der the Great," has made Aubrey Thomas 
 de Vere's name glorious in the literary 
 annals of the nineteenth century. But a 
 great tragedy on a subject which is what 
 the Germans call " epoch-making " de- 
 mands higher qualities than picturesque- 
 ness and that nameless grace and delicacy 
 so essentially Tennysonian. It needs 
 even higher qualities than the contrast 
 of marked characters, pointed epigrams, 
 or the fine play of poetic fancy. Lord 
 Tennyson's " Becket " has all the lower 
 qualities, Aubrey Thomas de Vere's " St. 
 Thomas of Canterbury " all the higher. 
 An oak is not more of an oak because 
 the sward around is starred by violets and 
 all the blooms of Spring ; and De Vere's 
 " St. Thomas " would not be a greater 
 tragedy if it had the exquisite touches 
 which the most delicate master of poetic 
 technique the world has ever seen gave to 
 " Becket." 
 
 Tennyson's tragedy is meant to be 
 an acting play ; De Vere's is, frankly, 
 a drama for the study. The lack of 
 
212 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 nobility in Tennyson's is due to the 
 necessity he felt of making it fit the 
 arbitrary refinements of the stage. 
 
 The episode of Fair Rosamond, which 
 is an offence against historical truth, good 
 art, and taste, would never have been in- 
 troduced had the late laureate not been 
 required to give a leading dramatic lady 
 something to do. Still, writers impreg- 
 nated with certain prejudices are always 
 crying, Cherchez la femme. If a man is 
 holy, and there is no disputing the fact, 
 they construct a romance with a woman in 
 it to account for his renunciations. Ten- 
 nyson has ruined a magmfLCQUt persona by 
 making him, on the eve of his death for 
 Christianity and liberty, drivel of what he 
 might have gained had he married. In 
 the monastery at Canterbury, just before 
 the tolling of the bell that calls him to his 
 doom, he sighs ; 
 
 There was a little fair-haired Norman maid 
 Lived in my mother's house : if Rosamond is 
 The world's rose, as her name imports her, she 
 Was the world's lily. 
 
 yob/i of Salisbury. Ay, and what of her ? 
 
 Becket. She died of leprosy. 
 
 John of Salisbury. I know not why 
 
 You call these old things back, my lord. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 213 
 
 Becket. The drowning man, they say, remembers 
 all 
 The chances of his life, just ere he dies. 
 
 Surely the poet who gave us a type of 
 purity in Sir Galahad, and of chaste eleva- 
 tion in King Arthur, might have better 
 understood the character of the successor 
 of St. Anselm. It is impossible to ap- 
 proach the climax, or rather anti-climax, 
 of Tennyson's play without impatience 
 and irritation. If 
 
 To be wroth with one we love 
 Doth work like madness in the brain, 
 
 the discovery that a true poet has misun- 
 derstood a grand character and frittered 
 away a sublime opportunity is an incen- 
 tive, too, to a helpless, hopeless sort of 
 anger. 
 
 In De Vere's "St. Thomas" there is 
 no anti-climax, no disappointment. We 
 miss sometimes the flowers that might 
 grow around the foot of the oak, but the 
 oak towers majestic. " St. Thomas " pos- 
 sesses what many of us thought lacking in 
 the less ambitious poems of an author who 
 has given out much light without heat, 
 sustained intensity of passion. Added to 
 
214 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 this, De Vere thoroughly understood the 
 historical meaning of St. Thomas's time, 
 and the relations of the great Chancellor 
 and Primate to that time. Of these the 
 laureate seemed to be in the densest igno- 
 rance, or he hid his knowledge for theat- 
 rical effect. If in " Queen Mary " he drew 
 his facts from Froude, and in " Harold," 
 it seems, from Bulwer Lytton, he appears 
 in "Becket" to have depended on his 
 own inner consciousness for his history. 
 He has in the most important particulars 
 ignored the authentic chronicles of his 
 time. 
 
 It was, indeed, an " epoch-making " 
 time, and one worthy of a grand com- 
 memoration in an immortal poem. Eng- 
 land owed her liberty to the Church ; and 
 more than all, to St. Anselm and St. 
 Thomas, because they first withstood the 
 advancing waves of royal despotism. 
 And the freedom of the Church was the 
 freedom of the people. St. Anselm put 
 into the " Mariale " the echoes of the 
 wails of the Saxon people, beaten down 
 by alien conquerors. The Saxons saw 
 their priests made powerless, their Church 
 enslaved, and themselves in hopeless 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 215 
 
 serfdom, when suddenly that Christianity 
 which knows no nationality, which fuses 
 all nations into one, asserted her might in 
 the persons of two primates, — one of the 
 conquering race, the other of the foreign- 
 er's court. The position of St. Thomas a 
 Becket has been misinterpreted so utterly 
 that he is often set down as an ambitious 
 revolutionist who tried, in the interests of 
 ecclesiastical tyranny, to dominate both 
 King and people. In truth, the Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury struggled for old 
 English laws against new ones devised by 
 the Normans to rivet more closely the 
 fetters of serfdom on the Saxon people. 
 
 It has been made a reproach against St. 
 Thomas that he resisted the " Royal 
 Customs," that he figured as a haughty 
 prince of the Church scorning the preten- 
 sions of the Plantagenet, and that he died 
 a martyr to his obstinate desire to crush 
 even royal freedom, that he and his 
 monks might triumph. This view is 
 founded on a misconception of the nature 
 of the Royal Customs. They were not 
 old Customs, but innovations invented by 
 the conquerors for their autocratic pur- 
 poses. De Vere puts into Becket's 
 
2i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 mouth a graphic description of these 
 famous Customs. The Earl of Cornwall 
 
 says : 
 
 You serve the king 
 Who stirred these wars ? who spurned the Royal 
 
 Customs ? 
 - Becket, The Customs — ay, the Customs ? We 
 
 have reached 
 At last — 't was time — the inmost of this plot. 
 Till now so deftly veiled and ambushed. " Customs *' ! 
 
 specious word, how plausibly abused ! 
 In Catholic ears that word is venerable ; 
 To Catholic souls custom is law itself. 
 
 Law that its own foot hears not, dumbly treading 
 A holy path smoothed by traditions old. 
 
 1 war not, sirs, on way traditionary ; 
 
 The Church of Christ herself is a tradition ; 
 
 Ay, 'tis God's tradition, not of men ! 
 
 Sir, these your Customs are God's laws reversed. 
 
 Traditions making void the Word of God, 
 
 Old innovations from the first withstood. 
 
 The rights of holy Church, the poor man's portion. 
 
 Sold, and for naught, to aliens. Customs ! Customs ! 
 
 Custom was that which to the lord of the soil 
 
 Yielded the virgin one day wedded ! Customs ! 
 
 A century they have lived ; but he ne'er lived. 
 
 The man that knew their number or their scope. 
 
 Where found, by whom begotten, or how named : 
 
 Like malefactors long they hid in holes ; 
 
 They walked in mystery hke the noontide pest ; 
 
 In the air they danced; they hung on breath of 
 
 princes. 
 Largest when princes' Hves were most unclean. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 217 
 
 And visible most when rankest was the mist. 
 Sirs, I defy your Customs : they are naught. 
 I turn from them to our old English laws. 
 The Confessor's and those who went before him. 
 The charters old, and sacred oaths of kings : 
 I clasp the tables twain of Sinai : 
 On them I lay my palms, my heart, my forehead, 
 And on the altars dyed by martyrs' blood. 
 Making to God appeal. 
 
 These usages of tyranny were the Cus- 
 toms that St. Thomas resisted to death. 
 Indeed throughout the whole of his work 
 De Vere departs from the chronicled truth 
 in nothing, except in the episode of Idonea 
 de Lisle, the ward of Becket's sister. 
 Idonea, a rich heiress, pursued by the 
 ruffianly knight De Broc, who "roamed 
 a-preying on the race of men," took 
 refuge with Becket's sister and was pro- 
 tected by the power of the Primate. De 
 Broc gained the King's ear, and, " on some 
 pretence of law," drove Idonea from the 
 house of Becket's sister. De Broc and 
 his friends sued for her as a royal ward; 
 judgment went against her, and we are 
 told that she escaped only by becoming a 
 postulant. 
 
 Judgment against her went. The day had come. 
 And round the minster knights and nobles watched : 
 
2i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The chimes rang out at noon : then from the gate 
 Becket walked forth, the maiden by his side : 
 Ay, but her garb conventional showed the nun ! 
 They frowned, but dared no more. 
 
 The feminine interest, to give which to 
 his tragedy Tennyson invented a new ver- 
 sion of the legend of Fair Rosamond, is 
 supplied by De Vere in this very fit- 
 ting episode of Idonea. It is artistic and 
 congruous, but unless put into action it 
 would not do for the stage. Idonea is 
 exiled from England when the King*s 
 wrath bursts on all ^the relatives, friends, 
 and dependants of A Becket ; she finds 
 refuge with the Empress Matilda, mother 
 of the King. Then occurs a scene between 
 the Empress and the novice, which, for 
 spiritual as well as intellectual elevation, 
 has seldom been equalled. 
 
 One would think that it would have 
 been easy to give the necessary feminine 
 element to " Becket " by the use of an 
 underplot ; but Tennyson has preferred 
 to bring the King's mistress, a "light o* 
 love," Fair Rosamond, into intimate asso- 
 ciation with the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, whose purity, even before he took 
 orders, amid all the temptations of the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 219 
 
 court, presided over by a loose-minded 
 Proven9al Queen, was proverbial. Fair 
 Rosamond is rehabilitated for the purpose 
 of the laureate. She is made to be, in her 
 own eyes, the lawful wife of King Henry ; 
 and the Chancellor — not yet made Pri- 
 mate — promises the King to protect her 
 against the vengeance of Queen Eleanor. 
 
 Becket, having become Primate and 
 gained the hatred of the King, does so ; 
 and, in a dagger-scene quite worthy of a 
 sensational play, saves her from Eleanor's 
 fury. After that he induces her to leave 
 her son and begin a novitiate in Godstow 
 convent, from which she emerges, with 
 the consent of the abbess, disguised as a 
 monk. She is thus present at the murder 
 of the Archbishop, and her presence excites 
 that tender retrospection so in keeping 
 with theatrical traditions, but so shock- 
 ingly contrary to the martyr's character 
 and the truth of history. It is here that 
 Becket says, according to Tennyson : 
 
 Dan John, how much we lose, we celibates. 
 Lacking the love of woman and of child ! 
 
 John of Salisbury seeks to give the 
 Archbishop consolation for his supposed 
 
220 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 loss, in a most ungallant and pessimistic 
 tone smacking somewhat of" sour grapes," 
 in which he reminds St. Thomas that he 
 might have married the wrong woman. 
 
 More gain than loss ; for of your wives you shall 
 
 Find one slut, whose fairest linen seems 
 
 Foul as her dust-cloth, if she used it ; one 
 
 So charged with tongue, that every thread of thought 
 
 Is broken ere it joins ; a shrew to boot. 
 
 Whose evil song far on into the night 
 
 Thrills to the topmost tile — no hope but death ; 
 
 One slow, fat, white, a burthen of the hearth ; 
 
 And one that, being thwarted, ever swoons 
 
 And weeps herself into a place of power. 
 
 This is hardly the way in which a 
 sturdy and ascetic priest and counsellor 
 would talk to an archbishop who, almost 
 at the moment of martyrdom, would begin 
 to look back at his " lost chances " of 
 matrimony. How different, but how true, 
 is the note struck by De Vere ! Becket 
 has been just made Primate, and he bursts 
 into a splendid speech to Herbert of 
 Bosham : 
 
 Herbert ! my Herbert ! 
 High visions, mine in youth, upbraid me now ; 
 I dreamed of sanctities redeemed from shame ; 
 Abuses crushed ; all sacred offices 
 Reserved for spotless hands. Again I see them ; 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 221 
 
 r see God's realm so bright, each English home 
 
 Showing that glory basks amid its peace : 
 
 I see the clear flame on the poor man's hearth 
 
 From God's own altar lit; the angelic childhood ; 
 
 The chaste, strong youth ; the reverence of white hairs j 
 
 'Tis this Religion means. O Herbert ! Herbert! 
 
 We must secure her this. Her rights, the lowest. 
 
 Shall in my hand be safe. I will not suffer 
 
 The pettiest stone in castle, grange, or mill. 
 
 The humblest clod of English earth, one time 
 
 A fief of my great mother, Canterbury, 
 
 To rest a caitiff's booty. Herbert, Herbert, 
 
 Had I foreseen, with what a vigilant care 
 
 Had I built up my soul ! 
 
 Becket's pupil, young Prince Henry, is 
 heard singing without, and the Archbishop 
 says, in contrast to the whines put into 
 his mouth by Tennyson : 
 
 Hark to that truant's song ! We celibates 
 Are strangely captured by this love of children. 
 Nature's revenge — say, rather, compensation. 
 
 Exiled in the Abbey of Pontigny, after 
 the King has poured his wrath on him 
 and his kindred for defending the liberties 
 of the Church and the people, he does not 
 break out into wild regret or sentimental 
 sighs. There is a manly tenderness in 
 his tone to the abbot: 
 
222 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 My mother, when I went to Paris first, 
 A slender scholar bound on quest of learning. 
 Girding my gown collegiate, wept full sore. 
 Then laid on me this hest : Both early and late 
 To love Christ's Mother and the poor of Christ. 
 That so her prayer in heaven and theirs on earth. 
 Beside me moving as I walked its streets. 
 Might shield me from its sins. 
 
 Abbot. Men say your mother 
 
 Loved the poor well, and still on festivals. 
 Lay her growing babe in counter-scale. 
 Heaped up an equal weight of clothes and food. 
 Which unto them she gave. 
 
 De Vere*s conception of the motives of 
 the martyred Primate is worthy of the 
 subject. Tennyson grasps only faintly 
 the Christianity of A Becket. In the 
 dialogue between the Abbot of Pontigny 
 and the exiled Archbishop, just quoted, 
 there is an example of Christian belief 
 which, like sustaining gold threads in a 
 tissue of silk, runs through the wonder- 
 ful tragedy of De Vere's. The Chan- 
 cellor is made Primate ; he becomes less 
 gay, less worldly, more given to the build- 
 ing up of his soul and mind, and more 
 spiritual. He, almost alone, stands up 
 for the Church and the people. Time- 
 serving court bishops cower ; the very 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 223 
 
 court of Rome — but not the Church 
 
 — seems to desert him. The Pope him- 
 self sends him the habit of the monks of 
 Pontigny, with the cowl filled with snow 
 
 — " the Pope knows well some heads are 
 hot." The Archbishop endures it all 
 with the meekness of a saint, yet with the 
 dignity of a man. Through all trials, up to 
 the time of martyrdom, he seems marked 
 for special grace. He is not singularly 
 learned, for the practical duties of the 
 kingdom have left him little time for 
 study. And yet he is well equipped with 
 fortitude, and his hope never falters. 
 Why ? We are answered : Because his 
 mother has loved God and the poor, and 
 because he so loves Christ's poor, fol- 
 lowing her behest. This point is accentu- 
 ated most sharply and artistically by the 
 author. 
 
 Tennyson draws very sharply the envi- 
 ous and fawning prelates around the King, 
 and his characterization is as keen and 
 delicate as we have had every reason to 
 expect it to be. But the virtuous priests 
 in " Becket " are certainly a strange group. 
 We know that the Church in England, 
 half enslaved by the State and burdened 
 
224 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 with growing wealth, had need of reforms 
 in discipline. De Vere, with a regard for 
 truth which has probably caused guile- 
 less non-Catholics to expect to see him 
 crushed by the Thunder of Rome, accent- 
 uates these facts. Matilda says: 
 
 I would your primate 
 Had let the Royal Custom be, and warred 
 Against the ill customs of the Church. 'T is shame 
 To ordain a clerk in name that lacks a cure. 
 Whom idleness must needs ensnare in crime. 
 Scandal — and worse — to screen an erring clerk. 
 More fearing clamor than the cancer slow 
 Of wily wasting sin. Scandal it is 
 When seven rich benefices load one priest. 
 Likeliest his soul's damnation. 
 
 John of Salisbury. . Scandals indeed ! 
 
 And no true friend to Thomas is the man. 
 Who palliates such abuses. For this cause 
 Reluctantly he grasped Augustine's staff. 
 Therewith to smite them down. Madam, the men 
 Who brand them most are those who breed the 
 
 scandals. 
 The Primate warred on such. The King to shield 
 
 them. 
 Invoked the Royal Customs. 
 
 De Vere does not whiten the courtiers 
 and sycophants, although clothed with 
 episcopal authority, who shrank from St. 
 Thomas at the King's scowl. He is even 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 225 
 
 more pitiless to them than Tennyson. 
 Tennyson, however, does not seem to see 
 the anomaly of making an archbishop 
 show an insubordinate and mutinous 
 spirit, which almost justifies the hot words 
 that King Henry is made to address to 
 him : 
 
 No ! God forbid, and turn me Mussulman ! 
 No God but one, and Mahound is his prophet. 
 But for your Christian, look you, you shall have 
 None other God but me — me, Thomas, son 
 Of Gilbert Becket, London merchant. 
 
 It may be said that Tennyson's idea of 
 St. Thomas is very human, and that the 
 poet has well depicted in rushing words a 
 proud nature towering and neither bending 
 nor breaking. It is well enough painted 
 from that point of view. There are some 
 exquisitely fine natural touches. But the 
 poet-laureate had no right to attempt to 
 depict the character of St. Thomas merely 
 from that point of view. Pride and en- 
 thusiasm would never have made a Chris- 
 tian martyr of Thomas a Becket, and it 
 is the full understanding of this that, leav- 
 ing out other qualities, makes De Vere the 
 greater poet and truer delineator of a hero 
 15 
 
226 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 whom it is almost sacrilege to misrepresent 
 for the sake of a theatrical succ^s d'estime. 
 
 The character of Thomas a Becket 
 belongs to Christendom and to history, 
 and the poet-laureate, rushing in where 
 angels fear to tread, not caring for or 
 understanding the sacredness of his sub- 
 ject, did both Christendom and art a wrong 
 by dragging an effigy of the martyred Pri- 
 mate in the dust. It used to be the fash- 
 ion to overlook the liberties that poets and 
 romance-writers took with history ; but 
 since historians have become romancers, 
 and even adopted the adjectives of the 
 poets, we are more exacting. No excuse 
 can be offered for Tennyson's falsification 
 of the character of A Becket, — so unUke 
 that of Shakespeare's treatment of Wolsey, 
 — not even an excuse that he needed dra- 
 matic color. He had a noble figure and 
 a sublime time, and he belittled them both, 
 because he would not understand them, 
 or because he was desirous of the applause 
 of the frequenters of theatres. 
 
 Tennyson causes the Pope's almoner to 
 suggest treachery to the Archbishop when 
 the King is urging him to sign the articles 
 against the freedom of the Church, Philip 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 227 
 
 de Eleemosyna tempts the Archbishop by 
 whispering that the Pope wants him to 
 do it: 
 
 Cannot the Pope absolve thee if thou sign ? 
 
 What plea can be offered for it in 
 the careful, overwrought work of a poet 
 whose fame is world-wide and whose 
 sympathy should not have been much 
 narrower ? 
 
 Becket bursts out in this speech : 
 
 Map scoffs at Rome. I all but hold with Map. 
 Save for myself, no Rome were left in England : 
 All had been his. Why should this Rome, this Rome, 
 Still choose Barabbas rather than the Christ, 
 Absolve the left-hand thief and damn the right ? 
 Take fees of tyranny, wink at sacrilege. 
 Which even Peter had not dared ? condemn 
 The blameless exile .? 
 
 Herbert of Bosham, the Archbishop*s 
 faithful friend, a devout cleric and a sen- 
 sible man, is made to drivel : 
 
 Thee, thou holy Thomas, 
 I would that thou hadst been the Holy Father. 
 
 To which Tennyson's Archbishop com- 
 placently replies ; 
 
228 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 I would have done my most to keep Rome holy : 
 I would have made Rome know she still is Rome, 
 Who stands aghast at her eternal self 
 And shakes at mortal kings — 
 
 Chronicles tell us that St. Thomas 
 was serene and dignified in all trials, but 
 " Becket's " serenity is frequently swept 
 away in gusts of evil temper, and he 
 is quite as foul-mouthed as the enemies 
 that bait him. The prelates around him 
 wrangle like school-boys, and the scene 
 at Northampton is simply a free quarrel. 
 De Vere comprehending that the key to 
 St. Thomas's conduct must be found in 
 a supernatural motive, avoids the almost 
 brutal mistakes of the laureate. The 
 scene of the signing of the Royal Customs 
 by A Becket was really at Clarendon ; 
 Tennyson transfers it to Roehampton. 
 De Vere treats this scene with keen per- 
 ception and admirable reticence. The 
 Archbishop does not forget himself or 
 burst*into violent assertions. He is made 
 to explain the episode of the almoner, 
 which Tennyson treats in a very different 
 way. He tells how he was deluded into 
 signing the articles. It is very different 
 from the version in which the Pope's 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 229 
 
 envoy whispers that one may sin freely 
 and be sure of absolution. 
 
 Came next the papal envoy from Aumone, 
 
 With word the Pope, moved by the troublous time. 
 
 Willed my submission to the royal will. 
 
 This was the second fraud ; remains the third. 
 
 My lords, the Customs named till then were few. 
 
 In evil hour I yielded — pledged the Church, 
 
 Alas ! to what I know not. On the instant 
 
 The King commanded, *« Write ye down these 
 
 laws," 
 And soon, too soon, a parchment pre-ordained 
 Upon our table lay, a scroll inscribed 
 With usages sixteen, whereof most part 
 Were shamefuller than the worse discussed till then. 
 My lords, too late I read that scroll. I spurned it ; 
 I swore by Him who made the heavens and earth 
 That never seal of mine should touch that bond. 
 Not mine, but juggle-changed. My lords, that eve 
 A truthful servant and a fearless one. 
 Who bears my cross, and taught me, too, to bear 
 
 one, — 
 Llewellyn is his name, remembered be it ! — 
 Probed me, and probed with sharp and searching 
 
 words ; 
 And as the sun my sin before me stood. 
 My lords for forty days I kept my fast. 
 And held me from the offering of the mass. 
 And sat in sackcloth ; till the Pope sent word, 
 ** Arise ; be strong and walk ! " And I arose. 
 And hither came ; and here confession make 
 That till the cleansed leper once again 
 
230 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Take voluntary back his leprosy, 
 
 I with those Royal Customs stain no more 
 
 My soul, which Christ hath washed. 
 
 De Vere shows consummate skill in 
 building up bit by bit the Archbishop, in 
 accordance with the character given him 
 by authentic writers. The Primate asked 
 of his servants their honest opinions of 
 this conduct, and accepted opinions thus 
 frankly tendered as his guide. The flat- 
 tery of Tennyson's Herbert of Bosham, so 
 complacently swallowed by the laureate's 
 political Primate, would have brought 
 down the censure of the real St. Thomas. 
 
 De Vere characterizes Llewellyn, the 
 Celtic cross-bearer, by a nice touch : 
 
 The tables groaned with gold ; I scorned the pageant ; 
 The Norman pirates and the Saxon boors 
 Sat round and fed ; I hated them alike. 
 The rival races, one in sin. Alone 
 We Britons tread our native soil. 
 
 Tennyson shows us the Archbishop 
 rushing to his death from obstinacy and 
 want of self-control. De Brito, Fitzurse, 
 and De Tracy have come to put into act 
 the hasty words of the King and to murder 
 the Archbishop. Becket rails at them 
 bitterly, throws Fitzurse from him, and 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 231 
 
 pitches De Tracy " headlong " after the 
 manner of the muscular Christian heroes 
 beloved of the late Rev. Charles Kingsley. 
 He even sneers at the monks whom Ten- 
 nyson makes to flee. " Our dovecote 
 flown!" he says, "I cannot tell why 
 monks should all be cowards.'* He still 
 repeats the sneer, until Grim, whose arm 
 is broken by a blow aimed at Becket, 
 reminds him that he is a monk. Rosa- 
 mond rushes in and begs the murderers 
 to spare the Archbishop, and then he is 
 slain, just as a thunderstorm breaks. 
 This climax, which in De Vere's tragedy 
 follows strictly the authentic account of 
 the sacrilege, is made trivial by a theatri- 
 cal stroke. 
 
 There is nothing in Tennyson's 
 " Becket " to compare with the lyrics in 
 " The Princess," or even the lute song in 
 " Queen Mary " ; but they are airy and 
 expressive of the mood of the persons in 
 whose mouths they are placed. Queen 
 Eleanor sings : 
 
 Over ! the sweet Summer closes. 
 
 The reign of roses is done ; 
 Over and gone with the roses. 
 
 And over and gone with the sun. 
 
232 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Over ! the sweet Summer closes. 
 And never a flower at the close; 
 
 Over and gone with the roses. 
 
 And Winter again and the snows. 
 
 It is quite in accordance with the mood 
 of the light-minded Queen, who is quite 
 past the August of life. She gives the 
 impression that she was half-crazedj a 
 kind of Proven9al bacchante, and her first 
 entrance destroys all respect for her sanity. 
 
 De Vere's " St. Thomas of Canter- 
 bury '' has a contrast in " Becket " which 
 makes it glow and seem more full of lustre 
 and color, as a ruby put in a circle of 
 brilliants. It is hard to account for the 
 blindness of the poet of the " Idyls of the 
 King " in venturing to attempt theatri- 
 cally what had been already so well done. 
 De Vere's place as a great poet was settled 
 when " Alexander the Great *' appeared. 
 " St. Thomas of Canterbury " was not 
 needed to teach the world what he could 
 do. But he gave it out of the abundance 
 of his heart ; and we may thank God that 
 we have a seer at once strong, pure, true 
 to his ideals both in religion and art, 
 worthy to wear the mantle that fell from 
 the shoulders of Wordsworth. ' 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 233 
 
 But this fact remains : elevation of 
 thought, force of poetry, fideHty to his- 
 tory, cannot make an acting play ; so 
 De Vere's tragedy is that anomalous 
 thing, a "closet drama," and, really, 
 with all its virtues, not a drama at all. 
 
 And this other fact, too, remains, that 
 Tennyson, in attempting to be theatrical, 
 left a form to which all the skill of Sir 
 Henry Irving could not even give the 
 shadow of dramatic vitality. 
 
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
 OF all critics Voltaire was the nar- 
 rowest and the most incapable of 
 appreciating the methods of com- 
 parative literature. He was almost ready 
 to say, with LeClerc, " The English have 
 many good books ; it is a pity that the 
 authors of that country can write only in 
 their own language." And yet, narrow 
 even to classical bigotry as he was, with 
 regard to all literature that was not a 
 French imitation of Greece and Rome, he 
 admits the continuity, the relativity, the 
 world-wide power of literature, when 
 he says, '' There are books that are like 
 the fire on our hearths: we take a spark of 
 this fire from our neighbors, we light our 
 own with it ; its warmth is communicated 
 to others, and it belongs to all." 
 
 The business of the student of literature 
 is to trace the pedigrees of books as well 
 as to compare books with books. And 
 
238 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 this comparison, this power of tracing, 
 implies in its result both concentration 
 and expansion. Every book has its pedi- 
 I gree ; and the ancestors of books, like the 
 ancestors of persons, cannot be uprooted 
 from the soil in which they grew ; they 
 are of their climate, of their time. As 
 the bit of tapestry from a far-off Turkish 
 palace carries the scent of the attar of 
 roses to distant lands and through many 
 changing years, so the book — one of a 
 line of books — mingles with the current 
 of thought long after it is forgotten, in the 
 life of an aUen nation. Joseph Texte, in 
 his " Etudes de Litterature Europeenne," 
 says : 
 
 " A literature, no more than an animal organ- 
 ism, grows isolated from neighboring nations 
 and literatures. The study of a living .being is 
 in a great part the study of the influences which 
 unite it to beings near it and of the influences 
 of all species which surround us Hke an invisible 
 network. There is no literature, and perhaps 
 no writer, of whom it can be said that the his- 
 tory confines itself within the limits of his own 
 country. How can the evolution of German 
 literature be understood, without knowing the 
 reasons for the acceptance on the part of 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 239 
 
 German writers of the French Influence, and 
 then of its rejection for the English influence ? 
 The history of the influence of Shakespeare in 
 Europe would, of itself, be an essential chapter 
 in the history of modern literature. Romanti- 
 cism i? primarily an international event, which 
 can be explained, as George Brandes says, only 
 by the inter-relations of various literatures." 
 
 The sentimental romanticism of Goethe, 
 as evident in " The Sorrows of Werther," 
 is due to the same influence that made 
 "La Nouvelle Heloise" of Rousseau, 
 and made Sterne's " The Sentimental 
 Journey"; but before Rousseau we find 
 that other sentimentalist, the Abbe Pre- 
 vost, whose " Manon Lescaut" was the 
 predecessor of " Paul and Virginia." Vol- 
 taire, as everybody knows, owed much 
 of his worst quality to the English Boling- 
 broke. In his serious works we find 
 English deism served with the esp7'it 
 Gaulois ; in the others, where wit and 
 bitter cynicism play like infernal lightning, 
 we find Rabelais changed, and yet the 
 same. To quote from Joseph Texte 
 again : 
 
 " It seems, finally, that the literature of the 
 modern epoch — and perhaps of all epochs — 
 
240 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 neither develops nor progresses without imi- 
 tating or borrowing : imitation of antique, as in 
 France in the seventeenth century; borrowing 
 from neighboring literatures, as in Germany in 
 the eighteenth. It is necessary, in order to make 
 original works germinate, to prepare the soil 
 with the debris of other works.'* 
 
 The student of literature, then, ought 
 not to attempt to take one book and 
 isolate it from its fellows. The beauty 
 and freshness and humor of Chaucer may 
 be enjoyed whether we go back to the 
 trouveres for the sources of his earlier 
 works, or trace the effects of Dante and 
 Petrarch on those later m life ; but for the 
 broadening of the mind, for the percep- 
 tion of that sense of continuity so neces- 
 sary for the knowledge of God's guidance 
 in history, for the value of literature as a 
 method of discovering the meaning of 
 laws, it is well that Chaucer should be 
 studied as a link in a chain. And yet not 
 only as a link in a chain, but as a link in 
 a chain running, as it were, through a 
 closely knit coat of mail, touching and 
 binding a hundred other links, large and 
 small, without which the gHttering gar- 
 ment of knighthood would be incomplete. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 241 
 
 It deepens pleasure to know the rela- 
 tions of books to one another. It makes 
 the study of literature easier, for it softens 
 that feeling of desperation which strikes 
 the reader when he enters a teeming 
 library. Where shall he begin ? How 
 shall he hew a line through this wilderness 
 of books ? The genealogy of the book 
 he loves will help him to do this, and its 
 posterity will further assist in the work. 
 Further, to put the study of the pedigrees 
 of books on higher ground, who speaks 
 the word "comparison," with the object 
 of discovering truths, speaks the word 
 " science.'* As Joseph Texte remarks ; 
 
 " If the history of literature does not consti- 
 tute an end in itself; if it aims, like all re- 
 searches worthy of the name of science, at 
 certain results which are at present beyond it ; ' 
 if it assumes, in fine, to be a form of the 
 psychology of races and men, the comparative 
 method imposes upon it the necessity of regard- 
 ing the study of one type of men, or of one 
 literature, as only an approach to a study more 
 worthy to be called scientific." 
 
 There are many reasons, then, why 
 
 books should be studied comparatively. 
 16 
 
242 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The mere investigation as to whether one 
 book is an imitation of another is not so 
 important or vital as the analysis of beau- 
 ties that have stimulated greater beauties 
 in another book. No reader will say that 
 Plutarch and Shakespeare resemble each 
 other. The Greek was a prose narrator, 
 greatest in his way ; the Englishman was 
 a dramatic poet, greatest in his way ; and 
 yet the influence of Plutarch on "Julius 
 Caesar*' and " Coriolanus " Is unmis- 
 takable. It Is as plain as the influence 
 of the Byzantines on Giotto, or that of 
 Wagner on the later manner of Verdi, or 
 of Pindar on the English ode of the 
 eighteenth century. Mangan and Poe 
 seem to have no close relationship. As a 
 rule, we do not think of them together, 
 and yet it is difficult, after reading these 
 poets, who evidently held peculiar and 
 sensuous theories about poetry, to believe 
 that Poe did not consciously imitate 
 Mangan. And the German influences 
 on Mangan are easily traced. How 
 much Gaelic metres affected him, it is not, 
 unfortunately, possible for me to say. 
 
 To return to Shakespeare : I once 
 asked a friend of mine who loved only a 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 243 
 
 few books, why he kept the maxims of 
 Epictetus, the Roman slave, so near the 
 plays of Shakespeare, who was more than 
 any Roman patrician. He simply turned 
 to a line out of Hamlet : " For there is 
 nothing either good or bad, but thinking 
 makes it so." " That is from Epictetus," 
 he said, " and the more I study Shake- 
 speare's philosophy, the more I find Epic- 
 tetus." So the little volume held its 
 place beside the many books of Shake- 
 speare's plays, and further examination 
 convinced me that it had reason to be 
 there. 
 
 Emerson, to come from the reigns of 
 Nero and Elizabeth to our own time, 
 owes much to Epictetus, but more to 
 Plato and Montaigne. He was not an 
 imitator but an assimilator ; to his philos- 
 ophy we owe little, but to his power of 
 stimulating idealism, much. Emerson 
 reflects Plato and Montaigne and his 
 New England skies at the same time. 
 His Plato is not the Plato of the groves 
 and the white temples, but Plato touched 
 by the utilitarianism of the cotton factory ; 
 his Montaigne is not the gay and po- 
 lite and witty and pensive Montaigne, 
 
244 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 content with his books and his Burgundy, 
 but a restless Montaigne, frost-bitten by 
 Puritanism, become oracular because his 
 auditors were too busy to contradict him. 
 
 If you compare the four essays on 
 " Friendship," — Cicero's, Montaigne's, 
 Bacon's, Emerson's, — you will find the 
 man Emerson surrounded and affected 
 by the shades of his literary ancestors. 
 If you examine his bumps, after the man- 
 ner of the discredited practices of phre- 
 nology, you will find that they are all of 
 the American type ; but you will find, 
 too, that the influence of his literary an- 
 cestors has, in its old-worldly way, cor- 
 rected the indications which the bumps 
 show. He is composite ; and the study 
 of the types that enter into his make-up 
 will give a clue to the methods that ought 
 to be used in the comparative study of 
 other authors, who are all composite. 
 
 Voltaire says that nearly everything in 
 literature is the result of imitation. But 
 Voltaire was as deficient in desire and the 
 power of real comparison as any of the 
 Romans or Greeks. He was the slave 
 of conventions ; and was almost as rigid 
 as that literary sans culotte who, in 1794, 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 245 
 
 refused to save a victim from the guil- 
 lotine because his petition had not been 
 put into academic language! If Voltaire 
 had said that everything great in litera- 
 ture was largely the result of assimilation, 
 he would have been much nearer the truth. 
 There are those who call Tennyson clas- 
 sical, in the sense of coldness and sym- 
 metry ; yet it can be easily shown that one 
 of his most influential literary ancestors 
 was Byron, who can be called neither cold 
 nor classical. In fact, if any poet is ro- 
 mantic, and sentimentally romantic, Byron 
 is that poet. In " Locksley Hall " and 
 " Maud,'* there is the Byronic note, with- 
 out the depths of Byronic despair. In 
 the first part of " Locksley Hall " Ten- 
 nyson's hopes and ideals are infinitely 
 higher than Byron's, and the passion is 
 infinitely purer in " Maud." In the sec- 
 ond part of " Locksley Hall " the impet- 
 uous boy, who feels that the world had 
 come to an end when Byron died, has dis- 
 appeared in the old man, whose hopes in 
 the " Christ to come " through science 
 and the new social order have completely 
 gone out. Tennyson's poetry has a long 
 pedigree ; and there are many quarterings 
 
246 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 on its coat of arms : among the heraldic 
 colors is the vert of Wordsworth as well 
 as the flaring vermilion of Byron ; but 
 there is one especially that cannot be ex- 
 pressed by any feudal tinct, and another 
 that may be symbolized by many. The 
 first is Theocritus ; the second. Sir Thomas 
 Malory. 
 
 From the first, Tennyson borrowed the 
 title of the greatest of modern epics, " The 
 Idyls of the King." And the influence of 
 Theocritus, the sweetest of all pastoral 
 singers, is found everywhere, but most of 
 all in " GEnone." Theocritus, who was 
 an ancestor of Vergil and of all later pas- 
 toral poets, takes new life in Tennyson. 
 Even the English verse translations of 
 this singer of the reed and the cypress 
 and of the contest of the shepherds in the 
 green pastures cannot wholly shut his 
 beauty from our view. It is as hard to 
 endure his artificial image as set up by 
 Pope as it is to endure that of Chaucer 
 as regilded by Dryden. Even Mrs. 
 Browning handles his exquisite idyls with 
 a touch that does not fit the violet of the 
 Spring. In prose translations some of the 
 aroma escapes, but enough of it remains 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 247 
 
 to cheer the soul with loveliness. To 
 read him in youth is never to forget him. 
 For Theocritus was the poet of nature, 
 the inventor of the little idyl-pictures of 
 town or country, — that singer of idyls 
 who, nearly three hundred years before 
 Christ, saw dimly Nature's God. He 
 says in the seventh eidulla : 
 
 " And from above, down upon our heads were 
 waving to and fro many poplars and elms ; and 
 the sacred stream hard by kept murmuring, as it 
 flowed down from the cave of the nymphs. And 
 the fire-colored cicalas, on the shady branches, 
 were toiling at chirping ; while, from afar off, 
 in the thick thorn-bushes the thrush was war- 
 bling. Tufted larks and goldfinches sang, the 
 tuitle-dove cooed; tawny bees were humming 
 round the fountains ; all things were breathing 
 the incense of very plenteous Summer and of 
 fruit-time. Pears fell at our feet, and apples 
 were rolling for us in abundance, and the boughs 
 hung in profusion, weighed down to the ground 
 with plums." 
 
 The warmth of the Summer is in 
 Theocritus. The gold and purple bees 
 float in the dry down of the thistle, and 
 Demeter's symbols, the spikes of corn 
 and poppies, glow golden and scarlet in 
 
248 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 the soft Sicilian air. Tennyson, too, 
 gives the color of the Summer and the 
 incense of the Autumn in symbols sug- 
 gested by the Syracusan. And from 
 the refrains of Theocritus he borrows, 
 as Poe borrows from Mangan, the ca- 
 dence of his music. 
 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman, in " The 
 Victorian Poets," has some pregnant 
 chapters on the resemblance of Theocri- 
 tus and Tennyson, and his passages show- 
 ing how Theocritus vitalized the English 
 poet as a bee vitalizes a flower are culled 
 with exquisite insight and taste. Among 
 these Mr. Stedman quotes the delicious 
 appeal of Cyclops to Galatea (in the 
 Eleventh Idyl), to compare it with the 
 passage in Book VII of "The Princess" : 
 
 Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height : 
 What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang). 
 In height and cold, the splendor of the hills ? 
 
 There is the echo of the Sicilian Sum- 
 mer in " The Gardener's Daughter " : 
 
 All the land in flowery squares. 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind. 
 Smelt of the coming Summer. . . . 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 249 
 
 From the woods 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
 The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy. 
 But shook his song together as he near'd 
 His happy home, the ground. To left and right. 
 The cuckoo told his name to all the hills ; 
 The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
 The redcap whistled ; and the nightingale 
 Sang loud, a though he were a bird of day. 
 
 " CEnone," with the pathetic refrain 
 suggested by both Theocritus and Mos- 
 chus, could not have existed in its pres- 
 ent form, had not the Syracusan sung 
 amid the hyacinth and arbutus. 
 
 In the black-letter of Sir Thomas 
 Malory, Tennyson read many times, 
 until his mind and heart were steeped 
 in the wonder of the old stories ; and 
 from the Elizabethan poets, who had 
 learned much from their Italian brethren, 
 he borrowed the allegory and added it to 
 the tales of Sir Thomas. Spenser him- 
 self, following Ariosto, — for Ariosto is 
 the chief literary ancestor of Spenser, — 
 had made an allegory. Tennyson strung 
 the many-colored gems of Sir Thomas 
 on the silver string of his veiled mean- 
 ing. Or rather, as he told his tales, the 
 beads of his allegory slipped through his 
 
250 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 fingers. But the stones of the knights 
 were greatly changed by the modern 
 poet. Arthur is not, in "The Idyls of 
 the King," the terrible monarch of fire 
 and blood of Sir Thomas Malory. An- 
 other age and other manners have soft- 
 ened the chivalric compromises of the 
 earUer times, for chivalry seems to have 
 been a series of compromises with an 
 ideal in the distance. The Arthur of Sir 
 Thomas Malory is not the saintly King 
 of Tennyson's imagination. In Malory's 
 " Morte Arthure," he does and says 
 things very inconsistent with the ideal 
 blameless King we love and revere in the 
 " Idyls." And the allegory which Tenny- 
 son wove cannot be read into the rough 
 doings of Arthur's knights. Nor did Sir 
 Thomas, or the sympathetic Caxton who 
 printed his book, see things as Spenser 
 and Milton and Tennyson saw them, — all 
 these seeing differently according to the 
 light of their time. But, if a book may be 
 judged by its effects, the " Morte Arthure " 
 does not deserve the condemnation of 
 those Elizabethan Reformers, like Roger 
 Ascham, who could excuse murder and 
 adultery in an unrepentant real king, but 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 251 
 
 held up hands of horror at a mythical one, 
 even when he repented. Says the grand 
 old printer, Caxton, in his preface to the 
 " Morte Arthure " : 
 
 " Herein may be seen noble chivalry, cour- 
 tesy, humanity, friendlessness, hardiness, love, 
 friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, sin. 
 All is written for our doctrine, for to beware 
 that we fall not into vice or sin, but to exercise 
 and follow virtue, by which we may come and 
 attain to good fame and renommee in this life, 
 and after this to come unto everlasting bliss in 
 Heaven ; the which He grants us that reigneth 
 in heaven, the Blessed Trinity. Amen. 
 
 " ' Ah, my Lord Arthur,' cries Sir Bedevere, 
 on the last day of the fight, ' what shall be- 
 come of me now ye go from me and leave 
 me here alone among my enemies ? ' ' Com- 
 fort thyself,' said the King, ' and do as well 
 as thou mayest, for in me is no trust for to 
 trust in. For I will unto the vale of Avilion 
 to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou 
 hear never more of me, pray for my soul ! ' " 
 
 We can all recall the Homeric echo 
 of this in Tennyson's — 
 
 The old order changeth, yielding place to new. 
 
 And God fulfils himself in many ways. 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
252 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Comfort thyself ; what comfort is in me ? 
 
 I have lived my life, and that which I have done 
 
 May He within himself make pure ! but thou 
 
 If thou shouldst never see my face again. 
 
 Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
 
 Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice 
 
 Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
 
 If, knowing God, they Hft not hands of prayer 
 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
 
 For so the whole round earth is every way 
 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
 
 " Now," says old Sir Thomas, when 
 the roses have faded, " now we leave 
 Guinever in Almsbury a nun in white 
 and black, and there she was abbess and 
 ruler, as reason would." How Tenny- 
 son refines upon this in the light of 
 more cultured genius and finer days ! 
 You remember the simple little novice 
 who sits at the sad Queen's feet, and 
 sings : 
 
 Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now ! 
 
 Tennyson writes of the nuns and 
 Guinevere : 
 
 They took her to themselves ; and she 
 Still hoping, fearing, " Is it yet too late ? '* 
 Dwelt with them, till in time their abbess died. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 253 
 
 Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life. 
 And for the power of ministration in her. 
 And likewise for the high rank she had borne. 
 Was chosen abbess, there, an abbess, lived 
 For three brief years, and there, an abbess pass'd 
 To where beyond these voices there is peace. 
 
 It is the province of genius, as Emer- 
 son says, to borrow nobly. If the im- 
 mediate ancestor of " The Idyls of the 
 King " was the " Morte Arthure " as 
 to matter, the remote ancestor was the 
 " Idyls " of Theocritus as to form and 
 manner. But I think it needs only time 
 to show how many other prose writers 
 and poets, how many changes of phi- 
 losophies, customs, and points of view, it 
 takes to make any writer who speaks to 
 the soul with wisdom and to the heart 
 with beauty. A poet descends from 
 heaven, step by step, like Jacob's an- 
 gels on bars of celestial light. God 
 only can create him, and the Ancient of 
 Days makes every hour from the begin- 
 ning move toward his coming, — and 
 each poet is the father of another poet. 
 
 Tennyson was the child of Sir 
 Thomas Malory and of his own time, 
 as Dante was of Vergil and of his 
 
254 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 time ; as Milton was of the Old Testa- 
 ment as interpreted by the rebels of his 
 time ; as William Morris was of Chaucer, 
 accentuated by the tense romanticism of 
 Dante Rossetti and the early Proven9al 
 poets. 
 
 Theocritus, Sir Thomas Malory, Ten- 
 nyson ! How near, and yet how far 
 apart ! And comparatively, how many 
 allied shades they recall ! You mention 
 " The Holy Grail," and up rise Spenser, 
 Milton, Lowell, — the Lowell of Sir Laun- 
 fal, — and then Wagner's " Parsifal," and 
 spirit of beauty after spirit of beauty, until 
 the earliest of them seems to touch the 
 very seraphim. We can as easily leave 
 out St. Thomas and St. Francis of As- 
 sisi in considering the genesis of Dante 
 as we can consider any modern great 
 work of literature without reference to 
 its pedigree. Music, too, is closely 
 bound to literature, — the myth of Lo- 
 hengrin is only a later version of that of 
 Cupid and Psyche. Wagner could not 
 have done what he did without the 
 Niebelungenlied ; nor Gounod, if the 
 Middle Age legend of Faust had not 
 been told from mouth to mouth, until 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 255 
 
 Goethe, borrowing nobly from the Book 
 of Job, made Faust vital and grandiose 
 for all time. If culture means the 
 broadening of the mind through the 
 widest knowledge of the best, it is hard 
 to see with what reason we can neglect 
 the study of the pedigrees of books. 
 
 If Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth, 
 Tennyson also succeeded Byron. While 
 Wordsworth was serene, a painter of 
 nature, Byron was the opposite of him. 
 He was fiery, volcanic, furious, lurid, 
 great in genius. He v/as popular, while 
 Wordsworth, whom the world is now 
 only beginning to acknowledge, was ne- 
 glected ; so that, strange as it may seem 
 at first, Tennyson's immediate predecessor 
 was Lord Byron. Byron's popularity 
 was great while he lived. The hero of 
 " Locksley Hall " — I mean the first 
 part of it, for I think the second part is 
 decidedly the better — is a Byronic hero 
 diluted. And the hero of " Maud " is 
 of a similar type. 
 
 In " Locksley Hall " the hero sighs 
 and moans and calls Heaven's vengeance 
 down on his ancestral roof because a girl 
 has refused to marry him ; because his 
 
256 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 cousin Amy marries another man, he goes 
 into a paroxysm of poetry and denuncia- 
 tion and prophecy. But, as Shakespeare 
 says, " Men have died from time to time 
 and worms have eaten them, but not for 
 love." And the hero of " Locksley 
 Hall " lives to write in a calmer style a 
 good many years later. " Maud," like 
 " Locksley Hall," showed something of 
 the influence of Byron. After " Locksley 
 Hall" and " Maud," the effect of Byron 
 on Tennyson seems to grow less. 
 
 The young Tennyson^s favorite poet 
 was Thomson, he of the serene and gen- 
 tle " Seasons." Mrs. Ritchie tells us 
 how very early the influence of Thomson 
 showed itself: 
 
 " Alfred's first verses, so I have heard him 
 say, were written upon a slate which his brother 
 Charles put into his hand one Sunday at Loutli, 
 when all the elders of the party were going into 
 church and the child was left alone. Charles 
 gave him a subject, — the flowers in the garden, 
 — and when he came back from church little 
 Alfred brought the slate to his brother, all cov- 
 ered with written lines of blank verse. They 
 were made on the model of Thomson's 
 " Seasons," the only poetry he had ever read. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 257 
 
 One can picture it all to oneself, the flowers in 
 the garden, the verses, the little poet with 
 waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning 
 the lines. ' Yes, you can write,' said Charles, 
 and he gave Alfred back the slate." 
 
 The poet of Alfred's first love was the 
 calm and pleasant Thomson, we see. 
 Later, as he grew toward manhood, he 
 read Byron. He scribbled in the Byronic 
 strain. How strong a hold Byron's fiery 
 verse had taken on the boy's mind is 
 shown by his own confession. When 
 Alfred was about fifteen, the news came 
 that Byron was dead. " I thought the 
 whole world was at an end," he said. " I 
 thought everything was over and finished 
 for everyone — that nothing else mattered. 
 I remember I walked out alone, and carved 
 ' Byron is dead ' into the sandstone." 
 Although " Locksley Hall" and "Maud" 
 show Byronic reflections, yet they were 
 not the earliest published of Tennyson's 
 poems. 
 
 The Greek poet, Moschus, wrote an 
 elegy on his friend Bion, and the refrain 
 of this elegy, " Begin, Sicilian muses, begin 
 the lament," is famous. Tennyson, this 
 modern poet, possessed of the Greek 
 17 
 
258 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 passion for symmetry, and influenced 
 almost as much by Theocritus, Moschus, 
 and Bion as by the spirit of his own time, 
 has made an elegy on his friend as solemn, 
 as stately, as perfect in its form as that of 
 Moschus, but not so spontaneous and 
 tender. There is more pathos in King 
 David's few words over the body of 
 Absalom than in all the noble falls and 
 swells of " In Memoriam." 
 
 I doubt whether any heart In affliction 
 has received genuine consolation from 
 this decorous and superbly measured flow 
 of grief. It is not a poen> of faith, nor is 
 it a poem of doubt ; but faith and doubt 
 tread upon each other's footsteps. In- 
 stead of the divine certitude of Dante, we 
 have a doubting half-belief Tennyson 
 loves the village church, the holly- 
 wreathed baptismal font, the peaceful vic- 
 arage, because they represent serenity and 
 order. He detests revolution. If he had 
 lived before the coming of Christ, in the 
 vales of Sicily, he would probably have 
 hated to see the rural sports of the pagans 
 disturbed by the disciples of a less pictur- 
 esque and less natural religion. 
 
 Keats could not have been Keats as we 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 259 
 
 know him, without Spenser. He is called 
 Greek, but he knew Greek best through 
 Chapman's Homer. Yet he caught the 
 spirit, and the form for him did not mat- 
 ter, — he had that from the " Epithala- 
 mium " of Spenser; and "no poet," as 
 M. Texte admits, " has excited more 
 vocations to poetry than Spenser." He 
 is, Hke Shelley, the poet for the poet. 
 Other poets may speak to the world ; he 
 sings to the sacred city. He lacks the 
 elevation of Spenser, deflected as it was 
 by the Elizabethan concession to the 
 political spirit of his time ; he is without 
 the unconsciousness of the Greeks, whose 
 spirit he assumed without understanding 
 it. He longed for sensations rather than 
 thoughts, for dreams rather than activities. 
 He was romantic, if romance implies 
 aspiration. The " Ode to the Nightin- 
 gale " expresses Keats. He was half in 
 love with " easeful death." He was not 
 Greek in this ; his neohellenism is like 
 the paganism of Swinburne, — it cannot 
 rid itself of the shadow of the Cross ; it is 
 black against the light of the Resurrec- 
 tion. Like Maurice de Guerin, he loved 
 the pleasures of sensation, and the fact 
 
26o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 that they must pass filled him with fear. 
 He turns to the immortal figures on the 
 Grecian urn with wild regret ; — all in life 
 that has life, dies ; only the work of the 
 artist, who uses inorganic stuff for his 
 material, lives! He felt, indeed, that his 
 name was writ in water before Shelley 
 made that splendid epitaph. 
 
 " Endymion " is a poem of shadows 
 in the moonlight. It is not Greek, but 
 it is touched by the spirit of Greece. It 
 is romantic because it bears everywhere 
 the burden of the poet's longing. " A 
 joy forever" he longs for; but all joys 
 pass as the moon passes, and the shades 
 of beauty with it. Keats is a neo-Grecian, 
 if you will ; his literary ancestors are the 
 gods of the rivers and the woods, as 
 Greek singers made them ; but he is 
 nearer to Ovid than to Theocritus, nearer 
 to Vergil than to Bion, and nearest of 
 all to this time, which, under the influence 
 of Sir Walter Scott and Byron, was the 
 time of longing for light and color and 
 glow and beauty that should be eternal. 
 He, in his turn, had influenced many. 
 When we speak of the Preraphaelites, 
 we imply the name of Keats. " The 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 261 
 
 Earthly Paradise " of William Morris 
 presumes the influence of Chaucer; but 
 who can read from ''The Earthly Para- 
 dise " without thinking of Keats ? 
 
 Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, 
 I cannot ease the burden of your fears. 
 Or make quick-coming death a little thing. 
 Or bring again the pleasure of past years. 
 Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears. 
 Or hope again for aught that I can say. 
 The idle singer of an empty day. 
 
 What we call the Puritanism of Spenser 
 was, on its spiritual side, the eclipsed light 
 of the Catholic years that had passed ; it 
 sustained him, for he was the son of Ari- 
 osto and of truth and beauty. And the 
 Puritanism of Milton, — of the mind, 
 not of the heart, — while it vitiated his 
 Christianity, did not subdue his Hebraic 
 elevation. Keats, the poet of earthly 
 beauty, had the feeling of the Greek for 
 the sensations of life, but he was op- 
 pressed by the fear that a day would come 
 when he and life must part. Heine, a 
 great lyrist, too (he was Greek by turns, 
 less sublimated than Keats), stood old, 
 almost blind, paralyzed, at the foot of the 
 statue of Venus of Melos, in the Louvre. 
 
262 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 And the world seemed about to go to 
 pieces, for the Revolution of 1848 roared 
 around him. The true Greek would 
 have died, satisfied that he had lived his 
 life. But Heine, who had lived for 
 earthly beauty and joy, who was already 
 dead because the pleasures of life were 
 dead to him, cried aloud in despair. 
 Earth could not give immortality ! Of 
 these neo-Greeks — not of the old 
 Greeks, but touched by their spirit — 
 was Keats. 
 
 The elegy of Theocritus for Daphnis 
 has echoed ever since he called on the 
 Sicilian muses to weep with him. If it, 
 with the recurrent refrain of musical 
 sorrow, touched Tennyson in our time 
 to sing of the dead Hallam, it spurred 
 Milton to raise the voice of music over 
 Lycidas, and Shelley to consecrate the 
 immortal " Adonais " to Keats. The ped- 
 igree of the English elegy is as easily 
 traced as that of the English ode, with 
 whose richness our literature actually 
 blazes. The Pindaric ode is a name of 
 horror in English, since a slavish imitation 
 of the sublime Greek distorted some of 
 the finest odes of Gray and Collins. The 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 263 
 
 spirit of Pindar helped to make the Eng- 
 lish ode the most beautiful in all the 
 world, but the attempt to give Greek 
 form to our verse has almost ruined, by- 
 meaningless strophes and antistrophes, 
 some of the loveliest of English odes. I 
 need only indicate the pedigree of the 
 ode at the highest by mentioning three 
 sublime names, — St. Teresa, Crashaw, 
 Coventry Patmore. 
 
 The raptures of St. Teresa inspired 
 Crashaw with the ode beginning- 
 Love, thou art absolute sole lord 
 Of life and death, 
 
 and with that other ode, less dignified 
 because its form is an English imitation 
 of the exquisite ever-changing music of 
 Pindar, which can be transmitted into our 
 tongue only by interpretation. Pindar 
 influences the form, and St. Teresa the 
 spirit ; but Patmore is touched by Crashaw 
 and not at all by the form of Pindar, 
 though he is nearer to Pindar than any 
 other of the poets, who failed to see that 
 each of his odes had a delicate shell-like 
 music of its own which could not be ex- 
 pressed by a short jumping line thrown 
 
264 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 in here and there among the longer ones. 
 William Sharp says : 
 
 " Each of the odes of Pindar has its own 
 music, as each conch stranded by the waves has 
 its own forlorn vibration of the sea's rhythm ; 
 whereas the so-called Pindaric odes of Cowley 
 and his imitators have no more individuality of 
 music than have the exercises of instrumental- 
 ists in contradistinction to the compositions of 
 
 The pedigree of the Pindaric ode in 
 English offers an admirable subject for the 
 study of a beautiful form twisted into an 
 incongruous shape by poets who blindly 
 followed one another. 
 
 There can be no question that a com- 
 parative study of the literature of the 
 Japanese and the Italian, the Basque and 
 the Teuton, would make for cosmopoli- 
 tanism, but who can speak of fixed literary 
 laws which shall bear exact scientific analy- 
 sis, without stretching the word "literary" 
 so thin that it must break? Philosophy 
 may be cosmopolitan or international — 
 Christianity is universal ; and if the whole 
 world were Christendom, animated and 
 active, there would be only one spirit 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 265 
 
 in literature ; but literature of itself must, 
 until the world shall all be one way of 
 thinking and feeling, be as varied as Mil- 
 ton's leaves in Vallombrosa ; for no two 
 leaves are exactly alike, though they are 
 all leaves. 
 
 Still, the value and beauty of literature 
 are best studied by processes of compari- 
 son which may be called scientific, and 
 these processes of comparison are ren- 
 dered easier by the consideration of the 
 pedigrees of books. 
 
DEFINITION OF 
 LITERATURE 
 
A DEFINITION OF 
 LITERATURE 
 
 IT is very hard to find even a working 
 definition of literature. Literature is 
 so closely the expression of life and 
 the changing conditions of life that we 
 can hardly limit it except by life itself. 
 And a working definition must have limi- 
 tations, though it may not entirely cover 
 the thing intended to be defined. To the 
 Greeks of Athens and the Romans of the 
 city of Augustus, it meant the imitation 
 of elegant models ; to us it means the ex- 
 pression of the phenomena of life in the 
 form of written words. 
 
 We can understand the meaning of lit- 
 erature only by studying the efl^ects of 
 ethical, social, political movements upon 
 life ; and this is best done through the 
 literatures of peoples, subject to their 
 changes. The body of Hebrew literature, 
 through which God himself has spoken, 
 is the history of the Jewish people. If it 
 
270 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 were merely the clear dry annals of the 
 Jewish people, it would be history, not 
 literature. But when we find the minds 
 of David and Job revealed in words, we 
 have essential history, but something 
 more than a mere annal, which is not 
 literature. 
 
 Literature, as far as it can be described 
 to-day, is more than the reflection of life ; 
 and it is much more than it seemed to be 
 to the Athenian Greeks, the Augustan 
 Romans, the French of the time of Riche- 
 lieu, or the Italians of the Renaissance ; 
 for, in their eyes, it was a narrow thing, 
 capable of rigid definition. It was not 
 what they imagined it to be, and they — 
 as the " Poetics '* of Aristotle and its imi- 
 tations show us — did not really succeed in 
 defining it. It was always elusive, in spite 
 of their fine rhetorical terms. They pur- 
 sued it, as Apollo pursued Daphne, only to 
 find, when they came near, that the nymph 
 had turned into a bay tree. To them 
 literature was a Galatea, who by all the 
 rules should have been marble, but who 
 under the very eyes of the critic amazed 
 him by assuming the life and incompre- 
 hensible fantasies of the universal woman. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 271 
 
 Literature in general, when we attempt 
 to define it, becomes as elusive as the 
 highest of its forms, which is poetry. 
 Literature reflects life in all its phases, to 
 use a trite comparison, as some of the old 
 Gothic cathedrals reflect life — from the 
 agonizing figure on the rood screen to 
 the grinning gargoyles on the roof and 
 the vile little demons — the seven deadly 
 sins — carved on the backs of the remote 
 stalls. It has its spires that spring up as 
 high as the clouds, and its crawling things 
 of the earth, symbolical of the vices of the 
 people that produce it. Its form changes, 
 not only with every great impulse of force, 
 but with every slight change of emotion. 
 It expresses, it illuminates, it interprets ; 
 it cannot exist without thought, but it is 
 more than thought. It is not philosophy, 
 but it is impregnated with the effects of 
 philosophy. It is not logic, or metaphys- 
 ics, or ethics ; but it cannot exist in per- 
 fection without a logical basis — and it 
 partakes of metaphysics and ethics. It 
 is neither scientia in the old sense — for 
 pure and colorless truth cannot be litera- 
 ture — nor science in the new ; yet it exists 
 through truth, and its phenomena are best 
 
272 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 explained by the methods of science. It 
 is not history, yet it is the beginning of his- 
 tory. It is not the personal word alone, 
 yet the personal word is necessary to its 
 existence. As I said, it is not ethics, yet 
 it expresses the morality of the nation 
 whose life it interprets. It is minutely 
 personal — personality is one of its es- 
 sences, and yet it represents better than 
 anything else the national life. 
 
 It has made war and restored peace ; it 
 has raised men to the shining feet of God 
 and led them to hell " to the lascivious 
 pulsings of the lute." Dryden, in " Alex- 
 ander's Feast," manifests the power of 
 music, but it was not music alone that 
 appealed to the great Alexander ; it was 
 literature allied to music, — the soul of 
 the body. 
 
 The definitions of literature are as nu- 
 merous and as inadequate as those offered 
 for poetry ; and they have given rise to as 
 many misunderstandings. These misun- 
 derstandings have induced certain modern 
 scientists to scorn literature as lawless, and 
 yet to assume the language of literature 
 to express their jibes, — not always to as- 
 sume it with grace, but, at any rate, to use 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 273 
 
 It, in order to be heard by all. These 
 jeering scientists have this, at least, in 
 common with the God they doubt, — that 
 they, unconsciously imitating Him, took 
 the form of literature when they spoke to 
 man. And the more literary they are, 
 the more the world heeds them. These 
 misunderstandings once led that most 
 methodical and scientific man of letters, 
 Ferdinand Brunetiere, to assert that sci- 
 ence is bankrupt ; it has enormous assets, 
 — assets so great that it need not apply 
 to the theologians for the certification of 
 its cheques. Its bad reputation is due 
 entirely to the fact that certain of its 
 stockholders have forced drafts on that 
 great theological establishment which it 
 can neither dominate nor destroy. 
 
 Literature is not, as Mr. Louis Steven- 
 son once defined it, a mere jille de joie, to 
 be enjoyed and cast aside, — a ballade for 
 the ears of the banqueting prince, a pre- 
 cious rondeau for the languid lady in the 
 balcony ; literature is not, as Cardinal 
 Newman implies, only the personal use 
 of language; it is not, as Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold would have us believe, the ethics 
 of the philosophy of life; it is not, as 
 
 £8 
 
274 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Mr. Swinburne insists, at its culmination 
 only imagination and iiarmony. 
 
 In his "Comparative Literature" Pro- 
 fessor Posnett says that works of literature, 
 whether in verse or prose, 
 
 " are the handicraft of imagination rather than 
 reflection, aim at the pleasure of the greatest 
 number of the nation rather than instruction 
 and practical effects, and appeal to general 
 rather than specialized knowledge. . . . Every 
 element of this dejfinition clearly depends on 
 the limited spheres of social and mental evo- 
 lution — the separation of imagination from 
 experience, of didactic purpose from aesthetic 
 pleasure, and that specialization of knowledge 
 which is so largely due to the economic develop- 
 ment known as ' division of labor.' " 
 
 We shall, I am sure, all consent to the 
 assertion that the value of literature must 
 be sought for in inherent personal qualities, 
 and its source must be looked for in 
 human nature rather than in artful rules 
 gathered from the examination of classic 
 books. We are sure, too, that the max- 
 ims of Aristotle — those, I mean, which 
 are not founded on human nature's love 
 of contrast, hatred of monotony, and the 
 4esire to be taken ovit of the bounds of 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 275 
 
 self — fail to indicate the scientific bases 
 of literature because they force the ma- 
 terial to suit the shape of the mould they 
 impose. We have gone beyond the blind 
 acceptance of the old standards to which 
 the epic, the tragedy, and the lyric were 
 forced to adjust themselves. It is as im- 
 possible to use them to-day as it is impos- 
 sible to turn our uninflected English into 
 genuine hexameters. On close compari- 
 son with the thing defined. Professor Pos- 
 nett's definition proves as unsatisfactory 
 as hitherto all definitions have proved. 
 
 Let us consider those manifestations of 
 the life of the soul on which he founds 
 this definition. However we may differ 
 in opinion as to the relative value of other^ 
 works of high literary art« there is only 
 one opinion about Dante's " Inferno." 
 You may argue about the " Purgatorio " 
 or the " Paradiso," if you will. You 
 may insist, too, that Milton's " Paradise 
 Regained " is a failure ; but you must 
 admit the eminence of " Paradise Lost." 
 No cultivated man will deny the masterly 
 qualities of the first part of " Faust," 
 though he may be reserved in his admira- 
 tion of the second. It is agreed that the 
 
276 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 " Inferno," " Paradise Lost," and the first 
 part of " Faust " are noble works of litera- 
 ture. And it is plain that the object or 
 the effect of these three masterpieces is 
 not to give pleasure, — that higher pleasure 
 of which even the Utilitarians admit the 
 existence. The object of Dante was 
 beyond and above the giving of pleasure. 
 When Milton pondered and wrought 
 until " dim suffusion " veiled his orbs, it 
 was not to give pleasure to the greatest 
 number. And who really believes that 
 Keats, rapt in the vision of Diana and 
 Endymion, spoke with the Utilitarian 
 purpose ? And who, knowing how Mau- 
 rice de Guerin wrote " Le Centaure " for 
 God, silence, and himself, can fail to see 
 that some of the greatest things of litera- 
 ture owe their existence to the desire to 
 express and yet not to communicate ? 
 
 There are great poems, like Browning's 
 "Sordello" and "The Ring and the 
 Book," that are beyond the liking or un- 
 derstanding of the greatest number. If 
 we leave out the author's intention and con- 
 sider only the matter of effect, we find, in 
 the so-called sonnets of Shakespeare, great 
 literature so personal and yet so appealing 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 277 
 
 that the interpreters far exceed in number 
 those to whom its beauty clearly speaks. 
 That flower of lyrical literature, the " Epi- 
 thalamium " of Spenser, touches only the 
 few. Admitting that the "Inferno'* is 
 literature, and leaving out the question 
 as to whether it appeals to many or not, 
 we cannot help seeing that Professor 
 Posnett's definition does not touch it. 
 I accentuate his definition because it is 
 largely accepted, and because Professor 
 Posnett assumes that it is scientific. It is 
 evident that in the " Inferno " Dante aimed 
 at " instruction and practical eff^ects " ; it 
 is evident that he attained his object by 
 illuminating his processes with imagina- 
 tion and harmony ; and yet, if we accept 
 this very modern definition, Dante and 
 Milton must be exiled, as Plato would 
 have exiled all the poets, — but for a 
 different reason. 
 
 When Orlando carved the name of 
 Rosalind on the bark of the oaks in the 
 Forest of Arden, he felt the impulse of 
 many poets, yet he made the name only 
 for silence and himself. Literature can- 
 not be judged as literature by the Utilita- 
 rian criterion. To make it a matter for 
 
278 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 the suffrage of the greatest number is to 
 take it into the ground now occupied 
 by politics. A literary man crowned by 
 the universal suffrage of the American 
 people — if the elect did not mercifully 
 intimidate voters — would be, for all time, 
 a pleasing example of mediocrity ! 
 
 With the beginning of the new century 
 the worship of Goethe has taken new 
 vigor. On all sides ascend thick incense 
 clouds to the manes of the many-sided. 
 But why is Goethe acclaimed? Because 
 of the aesthetic pleasure his lyrics give P 
 Because of the purely romantic qualities 
 of " Goetz " or the imaginative glow of 
 "Faust"? Not at all, — though these 
 qualities, too, are acclaimed, — but be- 
 cause in his works are said to be found 
 the germs of modern scientific develop- 
 ment. He is not regarded as less than 
 a poet for this or less of a man of letters, 
 but as more of a poet and more of a 
 maker of literature. A great part of his 
 claim on the modern mind rests, then, on 
 the very qualities which Professor Posnett 
 eliminates from literature. But Dante, 
 the poet philosopher who expressed Aris- 
 totle and St. Thomas and all the science 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 279 
 
 of his day, who founded the study of 
 comparative philology, would not be 
 lowered in the scale of literature if all 
 his erudition were plucked from him. 
 Erudition or science or experience is un- 
 poetical only when the poet is too small 
 for the weight he attempts to carry. But 
 Dante was able to give harmony and 
 the imaginative nimbus and symmetry 
 and color to both abstractions and facts. 
 There are poems great in themselves, 
 which are all compact of harmony and im- 
 agination, — for example, Shelley's " Ode 
 to the Skylark," Keats's " Grecian Urn," 
 Lanier's " Centennial Ode," Patmore's 
 " Ode to the Body." These may be 
 covered by this definition ; and still the 
 mystical bases of the last of them, 
 founded on philosophy and theology, 
 come perilously near to ruling it out. 
 
 Permit me to repeat Professor Posnett's 
 definition. It is found on page eighteen 
 of his " Comparative Literature." ^ Lit- 
 erature consists "of works which, whether 
 
 1 "Comparative Literature," by H, Macaulay Pos- 
 nett. D. Appleton & Co. , New York, 1896. "The 
 Science of Comparative Literature," by H. Macaulay 
 Posnett, The Contemporary Re'vienvj 1901. 
 
28o THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 in verse or prose, are the handicraft of 
 imagination rather than reflection, aim at 
 the pleasure of the greatest possible num- 
 ber of the nation rather than instruction 
 and practical effects, and appeal to general 
 rather than to specialized knowledge." 
 
 If we deny the value of this definition, 
 how can literature be defined ? I am not 
 sure that the big word literature can be 
 defined at all — I am not certain that the 
 great and ever-changing subject it stands 
 for will ever be rigidly described. But 
 it seems to me that to-day literature is 
 the expression in writing of thought, ex- 
 perience, observation, emotion, mood, 
 knowledge personally expressed. New- 
 man comes very near to this in his 
 definition of style. Scientia, pure and 
 simple, is not literature. There is no 
 personal expression in the Apostles' Creed, 
 though the personal pronoun is used 
 for the will that accepts scientia. The 
 Apostles' Creed is not literature ; it be- 
 longs wholly to no one person ; it is uni- 
 versal. The epical Isaiah, the pastoral 
 Ruth, the lyrical David, are literature. 
 And close are the relations of this litera- 
 ture to the spiritual life. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 281 
 
 Darwin*s book on the " Descent of 
 Man *' is literature, but not of the highest 
 kind. Newman's "Grammar of Assent" 
 is literature, but not of so high a kind 
 as his more personal " Apologia." Tyn- 
 dall's " Lectures " are literature, — more 
 so, from the point of view of style than 
 Herbert Spencer's. Froude's "History 
 of England " is literature, differing from 
 the two last-mentioned books because it 
 is of the literature of fiction and because 
 it is altogether finer in its expression. 
 Lingard, on the contrary, made good 
 history, but poor literature. The circle 
 of science does not touch the circle of 
 literature when science expresses itself 
 impersonally, — anything personally ex- 
 pressed and not inconsistent with the 
 genius of its language is literature ; but 
 the degrees of literature differ as the 
 faintest nebulae from the flashing constel- 
 lations. This is as far as I can go in 
 trying to describe literature. 
 
 But life is the pulse of literature, — 
 literature marks the movements of the 
 tendencies of life. It progresses as the 
 individual progresses ; it progresses as 
 the nation progresses. And yet this 
 
282 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 progress, so far as the nation is concerned, 
 has frequently ceased ; it has ceased even 
 before the death of the nation. The lit- 
 erature of a nation that has been great 
 never dies. Plutarch and Seneca have 
 influenced minds, Theocritus and Horace 
 have influenced hearts, more than Caesar 
 or Augustus ever influences minds or 
 hearts. Life has always turned toward 
 God ; and literature, echoing life, has al- 
 ways written the symbol of God. Life 
 expressed by iEschylus is far from the 
 life that made Racine as he was ; life 
 changing with Job is a far different life 
 from the life that Faust loved ; and yet 
 from Caedmon to Milton, from Pindar's 
 Odes to Wordsworth's " Intimations of 
 Immortality," life turns to the First 
 Cause. St. Augustine expresses His 
 beauty ; Dante, His splendor and jus- 
 tice ; and Longfellow, drawn by that 
 chain which binds genius to Him, shows 
 His halo on the brow of faithful woman- 
 hood. 
 
 Life cannot escape from its Creator, 
 and literature, pulsating with life, acknowl- 
 edges His power. Leopardi, Carducci, 
 Swinburne — fallen, clad, to use Ruskin's 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 283 
 
 phrase, in " melancholy gold " — curse 
 the flaming sword that will not allow 
 Pan to come back to earth. Leopardi 
 asks for death ; Carducci and Swin- 
 burne yearn for the time before the 
 Galilean had conquered. They express 
 tendencies of life, not merely themselves. 
 God, who is the centre of life, is the 
 centre of the written expression of life, 
 which is literature. St. Paul cries, with 
 God in his heart : " Charity is patient, 
 is kind ; charity envieth not, dealeth not 
 perversely, is not puffed up. . . . We 
 see now through a glass in a dark 
 manner; but then face to face. Now 1 
 know in part ; but then I shall know 
 even as I am known.'' St. Augustine 
 begins a passage full of joy in God : 
 " And thou gavest my mother another 
 answer to her prayers, which I remem- 
 ber." All this, coming from the soul of 
 life, is literature. If St. Thomas, in the 
 "Hymns of the Blessed Sacrament" ex- 
 presses scientia, his manner is exceedingly 
 personal and literary. The theologian 
 who pretends to despise literature, or to 
 look upon it as a mere toy, as the Turks 
 looked on woman, is likely to fall into the 
 
284 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 heresy of the Turks and to assume that 
 his mother had no soul. 
 
 There can be no doubt that some of 
 the misunderstandings of the relations 
 of Hterature to life are due to the prac- 
 titioners of literature themselves. They 
 have claimed to be as mystically irre- 
 sponsible as the Delphic oracle or the 
 HowUng Dervishes. Imagination — un- 
 trammelled imagination — was their idol. 
 They pretended that they Hved in flashes 
 of divine fire, when, in fact, the clever 
 had frequently caught them trying to 
 strike damp matches upon mouldy " af- 
 flatuses." There were no laws for them ; 
 they sang as the wind sings; they were 
 reeds by the river of the Ineffable. They 
 gushed carefully written impromptus. 
 Order, dignity, knowledge was valueless. 
 And the more ignorant of the cultured 
 took these gentlemen at their own valua- 
 tion. And hence arose legends of the mad, 
 glad, bad poet. And he warmed his hands 
 by the divine fire in his cold garret. And 
 he had no food but a roast leg of Pegasus 
 served with laurel leaves boiled by the 
 muses. And there was not any such per- 
 son. And so they called him a Bohemian 1 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 285 
 
 There have been, too, enthusiastic 
 apologists who could not see that the 
 great author and the little author were 
 bound by the conditions of ordinary life. 
 Literature, they have said, — literature 
 that comes from great minds, — is uni- 
 versal. Its producer knows all things 
 by intuition. But Dante was a hard stu- 
 dent ; still, there were many things he did 
 not know. Coleridge, like a priest of 
 Isis, gashed himself, to adore Shakespeare. 
 The Bard of Avon was all-knowing, of all 
 time — intuition made him so. Law! — 
 gods, what a lawyer he was ! Philoso- 
 pher ! — he must have been, in dreams, 
 intimate with the Greeks 1 Zoologist ! — 
 how wonderful ! In spite of Coleridge, 
 lawyers have shown how superficial was 
 Shakespeare's knowledge of law. It is 
 evident that he was so ignorant of the 
 facts of animal life, beyond Warwickshire, 
 that he might have written Goldsmith's 
 "Animated Nature." What he saw — 
 and he knew how to see — he expressed. 
 He was not above life or law or the con- 
 ditions of life. He was of his time ; his 
 local prejudices and points of view limited 
 him. His power of synthesis was great, 
 
286 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 but he cultivated it from his youth up. 
 He was no more all-knowing than Dante, 
 or Calderon, or Goethe, or Wordsworth 
 was all-knowing. 
 
 On the other hand, in English-speaking 
 countries, which are the last to realize 
 what art means, literature has not been 
 approached rationally, as Matthew Arnold 
 scornfully admits. The man who had 
 lately acquired much from the Germans 
 without in the least understanding it 
 laughed loftily at literature because he 
 had discovered a new worm. Dante 
 might sing of the seraphim, but your 
 scientist of this sort doubted the exist- 
 ence of seraphim because, as there was 
 no record of their vaccination, they must 
 have died of small-pox ! Mere philoso- 
 phy he might accept; anybody of ordi- 
 nary intelligence could count combinations 
 of vowels, and it was even possible that 
 the catarrh prevalent in the lake districts 
 might have effected the consonantal 
 sounds. These gentlemen would have 
 sacrificed the Book of Job for a new 
 principle of motion, and the Iliad for the 
 discovery of the jumping apparatus in 
 the skeleton of a flea. A new earth had 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 287 
 
 come, without a new heaven, — romance 
 and poetry and lyrical beauty had gone. 
 Literature and science had met, and 
 science had conquered, leaving 
 
 A broken chancel with a broken cross. 
 
 Of course this was irrational. The 
 only man of letters who took this sort 
 of thing seriously was Zola. He tried to 
 turn himself into a scientific naturalist ; 
 he became a creature so monstrous that 
 even curiosity became disgusted. 
 
 There can be no conflict between liter- 
 ature and science. There could be no 
 conquering of one by the other, nor driv- 
 ing of one by the other out of its proper 
 domain, unless the longing to draw nearer 
 the immortal, the love of harmony, the 
 interest in other lives, the desire for the 
 ideal, the yearning for a broader and a 
 better life were taken from our existence 
 here ; for literature, the production of life, 
 answers to the burning needs of life. 
 
 Lowell says that fairy tales, consolations 
 in the twilight of desolation, are " the 
 dreams of the poor." Science could an- 
 alyze Puck and prove him to be wander- 
 ing phosphorus, and that the spectres of 
 
288 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Rip Van Winkle in the Catskills were 
 due to microbes in his whiskey. Science, 
 for a time, — being young and ignorant, 
 but not intrinsically evil, — seemed to for- 
 get that humanity loves the fairies of its 
 dreams, not because they exist, but be- 
 cause it wants them to exist. It was a 
 phase of life that science should have 
 attacked, and not literature, which merely 
 presented this phase. 
 
 Literature, rationally studied, will be 
 found to touch life at all points. It 
 does not always concern itself with the 
 dreams of those who dwell in exile. It 
 does not always concern itself with ideals. 
 " Man's work," Newman says, in " The 
 Idea of a University," " will savor of 
 man, in his element and power excellent 
 and admirable, but prone to disorder and 
 excess, to error and to sin. Such, too, 
 will be his literatui* ; it will have the 
 beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness 
 and the rankness, of the natural man, 
 and, with all its richness and greatness, 
 it will necessarily offend the senses of 
 those who, in the Apostle's words, are 
 really ' exercised to the discerning of 
 good and evil.' " 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 289 
 
 This is true, for literature is like the 
 string of a violin in tune ; it responds to 
 the slightest change of national tempera- 
 ture. It was aristocratic and classical 
 under Augustus and Louis XIV ; aristo- 
 cratic and romantic under Elizabeth. It 
 became in England, in 1688, classic again, 
 to drift gradually into democracy. In 
 France, after 1793, it was at once artifi- 
 cial and sentimental. When Jeremy Ben- 
 tham's ideas flourished in England, it 
 became Utilitarian and preached the doc- 
 trines of common sense. When Boling- 
 broke reflected the tendencies of the time, 
 it was affected with polite Deism. Boling- 
 broke furnished Voltaire with ideas. And 
 France, in return, sent artificial tears and 
 sentimental theories to the English Sterne. 
 
 Life acts and reacts through literature ; 
 it asserts and denies through literature. 
 But who can say how far the vital book 
 influences a people, and how far the peo- 
 ple have influenced the vitality of a book ? 
 Literature forces the abstractions of the 
 philosopher into the conduct of life. The 
 pessimism of Schopenhauer is brought, 
 through the novel, to our very hearth- 
 stones. The illusions of self-styled truth 
 19 
 
290 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 permeate our familiar companion, the daily- 
 newspaper. " Man," as Fierns-Gevaert 
 says, in " La Tristesse Contemporaine " 
 " thinks of himself as an equal co-worker 
 with God ; he believes that modern in- 
 ventions supply oversights of the Creator 
 in the beginning." One may find some- 
 thing of this in Rudyard Kipling. *' All 
 modernity," continues Fierns-Gevaert, 
 "suffers for the lack of love. Our mul- 
 tiplied activities, our haste in work, the 
 quickness in communication, the desire 
 for long voyages and the ease with which 
 they are accomplished, hasten to a speedy 
 end the marked decadence of meditation." 
 Philosophical speculation and industrial 
 changes affect the life of all classes, and 
 literature expresses their effects. It seems 
 only the other day as if the whole world 
 was governed by pessimism, with litera- 
 ture as its prophet. The essay, the poem, 
 the novel, even the little lyric spoke of 
 gloom and of hopeless gloom. Studied 
 rationally as a manifestation of the psy- 
 chology of life, — of the psychology of 
 the individual, as well as of the psy- 
 chology of a people, — literature gives 
 the clue to the problem. But what 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 291 
 
 method can be supplied to humanity to 
 tell us when the action will end, in any 
 movement, and the reaction begin ? And 
 until we can find some scientific means of 
 discovering the laws that govern the flux 
 and reflux of human minds, we must be 
 content to use literature as a working test. 
 When the various human phenomena are 
 explained, there will be no need to exam- 
 ine literature apart from this explanation. 
 The limitations of life bar out the analysis 
 of literature aside from life. One limit- 
 edly explains the other; and just as a 
 single phase of literature seems fixed, 
 a reaction or a revolt begins. " Ro- 
 mance, the root of all evil, is dead, the 
 pernicious ideal is dead," Zola exclaimed 
 triumphantly, not very long ago; "the 
 dreams of the poor are gone, the legends 
 of the saints and heroes are gone — 
 science, as expressed by the realist, is the 
 meaning of the modern world !" 
 
 Suddenly there is a change. The 
 civilized world plunges into a sea of 
 romance. The realistic rats and the 
 pumpkin of Cinderella are changed to the 
 apparatus of splendor in a moment. Is 
 " Cyrano de Bergerac " or " Ulysses " a 
 
292 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 cause or an effect? This much is certain ; 
 its idealism has found a ready response 
 from the heart of life. Pessimism goes 
 out; the dilettanti even smile again. 
 In Paris it is said aloud that God may- 
 no longer fear that He may not be believed 
 in. Science no longer talks of analyz- 
 ing the seraphim. Zola lays sacrilegious 
 hands on the tabernacle of the spiritual 
 life. The world all at once finds him 
 ridiculous. Literature reflected the change 
 from blatant doubt to mystical reverence, 
 and concentrated the rays of the new 
 light'. How powerful it is in its action 
 upon life, and how sensitive to every 
 change in the tendencies of life ! 
 
 The wizard waves his wand, and we 
 forget or are consoled. High to heaven 
 we go with St. John, or down to hell with 
 Dante. We have left for a time the chill 
 of earth's wind. Life demands this — 
 and the demand is a cry for immortality. 
 Literature answers the demand, for liter- 
 ature is a servant and a master of life. 
 
THE EBB AND FLOW OF 
 ROMANCE 
 
THE EBB AND FLOW OF 
 ROMANCE 
 
 EVERYBODY finds it easier to 
 describe than to define the word 
 "romantic" as applied sometimes 
 to the Homeric books, oftentimes to 
 Mademoiselle de Scudery's " Grand 
 Cyrus/' and always to Sir Walter Scott's 
 poems and novels. And most arguments 
 about the meaning of this term end, as 
 they end in Alfred de Musset's " Lettres 
 de Dupuis a Cotonet," in a series of 
 contradictions. 
 
 Of late, interest in the philosophical 
 and social forces that affect literary move- 
 ments seems to have increased among 
 persons busy about other things. And 
 the excuse for this essay — which contains 
 the essential points of several lectures for 
 students — is that it is meant as an 
 answer to several questions from such 
 persons. 
 
296 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 That the romantic movement and the 
 reactions from it were dependent on philo- 
 sophical, social, and political influences is 
 obvious. That they were not always 
 conscious — not always the result of rules 
 or formulated principles — seems quite as 
 evident. 
 
 It is easy to prove that in the Golden 
 Age of Spanish literature the literary 
 movement was not a conscious, philo- 
 sophical movement. 
 
 The epoch of the drama in Spain — 
 that epoch which Cervantes, Lope de 
 Vega, and Calderon made, and which 
 lasted about one hundred years — was 
 romantic. It was romantic both in spirit 
 and in form. The famous plays of Cer- 
 vantes, " Numantia " and " The Captives 
 of Algiers,'* disregard all classical rules. 
 Cervantes did for the Spanish stage what 
 Corneille did for the French, — he fixed its 
 best elements ; and Lope de Vega, his 
 successful rival, carried on the work which 
 Calderon*s masterpieces finally completed. 
 The seventeenth century, in the beginning 
 of which Shakespeare died, saw, in Spain, 
 Cervantes found a new school of novelists 
 with " Don Quixote," and likewise pave 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 297 
 
 the way, in the drama, for the wonderful 
 Lope de Vega and the still more wonder- 
 ful Calderon. 
 
 In France Corneille borrowed largely 
 from Spanish material, he remained classi- 
 cal both in feeling and form ; and Racine, 
 more human, more sympathetic, was 
 almost an abject slave to the French 
 versions of the rules of Aristotle. Cor- 
 neille was so Roman in his feeling, and 
 so imitative of the models furnished by 
 Seneca, that it has been truly said that, as a 
 rule, " all his men are demigods and all his 
 women men.'* Cervantes, Lope de Vega, 
 Calderon, wrote as if the rules of Aristotle 
 and the classical formulae had never existed. 
 They were as romantic as Victor Hugo, 
 but they had merely to take episodes from 
 the life around to make thrilling incidents 
 in a comedy of the cloak and sword, or in 
 that more heroic species of drama which 
 answers to our idea of tragedy. 
 
 Webster's Elizabethan romantic play, 
 " The Duchess of Malfi," which is made 
 up principally of ghosts and murderers, is 
 not more regardless of the classical rules or 
 more romantic than Cervantes' " Numan- 
 tia " or Calderon's " The Physician of His 
 
298 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Own Honor." Previous to Cervantes, 
 the imitators of Italy — the believers in 
 imitation, which is the essence of classicism 
 
 — had held sway ; but Cervantes turned 
 to the people and reflected the taste of the 
 proud, fantastic, yet grave and religious 
 Spaniard. He succeeded, he tells us, in 
 such measure that during the progress of 
 at least thirty of his plays not even a 
 cucumber or an orange — missiles used 
 against the unpleasing comedians of the 
 Spanish theatre — was thrown upon the 
 stage ! Comedy, in the Spanish sense, 
 was not comedy in the sense of Moliere, 
 
 — a play of manners ending happily. It 
 might be a very serious drama, rehgious 
 in motive, grave in method, yet not with- 
 out comic incidents. Cervantes changed 
 it from four to fivQ acts. From the 
 Spanish point of view, " The Merchant 
 of Venice " and " Measure for Measure " 
 are comedies, though the Elizabethan 
 would probably have called them tragi- 
 comedies and the French critics of the 
 eighteenth century refused to classify them 
 except as barbarous. 
 
 Lope de Vega frankly says that he 
 followed the tastes of the people. The 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 299 
 
 king or the coterie had very little to do 
 with him. He was, although he knew 
 thoroughly all the classical dicta, entirely 
 democratic. No plot was too intricate 
 nor episode too improbable for him. And 
 " The Wonderful Magician " of Calderon 
 well shows how passionately romantic, how 
 disdainful of the classical autocrats, the last 
 great master of the Spanish drama was. 
 The Golden Age of Spanish literature was 
 romantic and democratic. It was, as 
 Heine says of literature in general, "a 
 mirror of life." It was not a conscious 
 revolt against imitation or arbitrary rules. 
 Lope de Vega put it naively when he said 
 that he ''gave the people what they paid 
 for." 
 
 The religious side — deep, essential, 
 fervent — of the Spanish people was not 
 left out of their dramas. This romantic 
 time has left some wonderful religious 
 pieces, which must grow in the estimation 
 of critics the better they are known. 
 There are the " Autos Sacramentales " of 
 Lope de Vega and Calderon. Cervantes 
 was the first to conceive, for dramatic 
 purposes, the soul of man as a little 
 world, in which all the emotions, passions, 
 
300 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 aspirations, sins — supernatural grace itself 
 — are personified. The origin of the 
 Spanish theatre was not religious, though, 
 like all theatres, it expressed religion when 
 the people were religious. The religious 
 drama, "Sacramental Acts," — splendid, 
 elevated, as rich in poetry and colored 
 language as the studded background of a 
 Byzantine Madonna is in gems, — is a 
 distinct expression of the personal and 
 national spirit of Spain. The form of the 
 " Autos " is romantic. They represent 
 the religious drama at its highest point, 
 and they could only come from and ap- 
 peal to a people to whom the teachings of 
 religion were not only familiar but vitally 
 interesting. They are no wild, semi- 
 barbarous miracle-plays or moralities, but 
 works of art and poetry, touched with 
 divine fire. They are the product of 
 trained theologians and philosophers, and 
 they appeal to no illiterate people. They 
 represent a special phase of the religious 
 romantic literary movement. 
 
 If the poetry of Chaucer is romantic in 
 spirit, it is only so in the sense that it was 
 bound to no narrow treatment of subject 
 or to no fixed models of imitation outside 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 301 
 
 the poet*s intellectual taste. The intro- 
 duction to " The Canterbury Tales " is 
 realistic. No modern novel could, in the 
 best sense, be more so. " The Knight's 
 Tale " is romantic, if you will, because it 
 clothes the Greeks of the old legends with 
 the panoply of the Middle Ages. The- 
 seus, the Greek, becomes a Duke, and the 
 apparatus of the story of Arcite is brought 
 down to the point of view of the four- 
 teenth century. If we call Chaucer ro- 
 mantic because he represented life as he 
 saw it and delighted in his own time, why 
 not call Homer romantic? 
 
 " Chaucer's pages," says Professor 
 Beers in his " History of English Ro- 
 manticism in the Eighteenth Century," 
 "abound with tournaments, hunting par- 
 ties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, 
 feats of magic; but they«are robed as well 
 with the everyday life of the fourteenth- 
 century England." Here we have roman- 
 ticism and realism touching. And if we 
 apply, as we may, the spirit of Professor 
 Beers's words to Homer, we must admit 
 that the chief of all Greek poets is a 
 classic without being more classical than 
 Chaucer, and that, at least in his picture 
 
302 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 of Odysseus and the lovers of Penelope, 
 he was as romantic as Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 The drama of England down to the 
 Restoration was frankly romantic. There 
 was no conflict between the classical and 
 romantic schools, though Ben Jonson 
 doubtless sighed over Shakespeare's 
 romanticism when he admitted that the 
 author of" Hamlet" had little Latin and 
 less Greek. It is certain that Shakespeare 
 did not trouble himself about the rules of 
 Aristotle, and that there were no critics in 
 his audience who objected to the form of 
 " The Merchant of Venice " as unclassical. 
 Dryden might have done so ; but in the 
 latter part of the sixteenth century Dry- 
 den had not yet begun to be the first of 
 English professional critics. As it is, it is 
 to his credit that when, under the French 
 influence of the Restoration, Shakespeare 
 had almost been forgotten, he raised even 
 a timid plea for him. But after 1688 — 
 the year of Pope's birth and the beginning 
 of constitutional government in England 
 — classicism came into fashion. 
 
 The Italian conceits and the euphuisms 
 of Sir Philip Sidney and Surrey, carried to 
 excess, had been ridiculed by Shakespeare 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 303 
 
 and were out of fashion; and so were the 
 spontaneity, the freshness, the love of the 
 natural man, which had distinguished 
 Shakespeare and the best of his contem- 
 poraries. Addison and Pope gave the 
 tone to verse and prose ; and, reticent as 
 it was, the apotheosis of the commonplace 
 as it was, it showed a healthy reaction 
 against the false sentiment and unbridled 
 license of the years of Charles II and 
 James II. It was such prose and verse 
 as comfortable deists might write, — deists 
 who would consider the Apocalypse an 
 exaggeration in bad form, and the death 
 of a Christian martyr as a very shocking 
 performance, which a grain of incense 
 gracefully dropped before a well-modelled 
 god would have prevented. Romance 
 was out of fashion; for romance meant 
 aspiration and unrest, an interest in the 
 past, a reaction against the present ; and 
 Addison and Pope and others were quite 
 willing, before the comfortable fires of 
 their favorite coffee-houses, to believe that 
 "whatever is, is right." 
 
 If Pope and Addison were aristocratic 
 and classical, " icily regular, splendidly 
 null," they preceded an era of democracy. 
 
304 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 The time when Addison could assume the 
 mantle of Dryden and become an autocrat 
 of literature was rapidly passing. The 
 day of the patron was passing. The 
 great Dean Swift might go about among 
 his noble friends extorting guineas for his 
 " little Papist poet, Pope" ; but the years 
 were at hand when historians, poets, and all 
 book-makers were to appeal to the people, 
 not to a coterie. The Hotel de Ram- 
 bouillet and the year 1600 were gone for- 
 ever; the ladies whose criticisms made or 
 unmade Corneille, who encouraged the 
 young Bossuet, and who displaced a court 
 preacher because they could whisper to 
 that arbiter of letters, the Cardinal Riche- 
 lieu, that he used non-academic words, 
 had passed like the snows of last year. 
 The time was coming when the democratic 
 idea, which did not concern itself with 
 kings and princes, was to find expression 
 in letters and to dominate. In France it 
 came out in the romantic revolt of Victor 
 Hugo; from 1774 until his time it had 
 been as sordid in letters as the Marats 
 and Robespierres who let loose the hurri- 
 cane of revolution. It was an appeal of 
 the individual to individuals. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 305 
 
 In France it was a conscious revolt, 
 with principles and a formula. In Eng- 
 land it expressed itself in a new vein of 
 history, but, first, in the novels of Field- 
 ing and Smollett. 
 
 Shakespeare could not conceive a man 
 heroic who had not noble blood. So sure 
 of this was he that his first object when 
 he went back to Stratford a rich man was 
 to restore the family arms. Hamlet was 
 a prince, Rosalind the daughter of a duke, 
 Macbeth a patrician of his land, Perdita 
 the daughter of a king, Portia of a great 
 caste in Italy, and Romeo high among his 
 people. Fielding changed all this, and 
 the hero of the first great novel of the 
 eighteenth century is a foundling. More- 
 over, Fielding holds the mirror up to 
 nature. He is a realist, but he does not 
 proclaim himself so. The time, as he 
 pictured it, is a coarse and animal time, 
 when religion had ceased to be more than 
 a name for a comfortable belief that the 
 Supreme Being would never think of 
 damning anybody who paid an income 
 tax. The comfortable middle classes be- 
 gan to reign. 
 
 The novels of Miss Austen and Miss 
 20 
 
3o6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Edgeworth preceded those of Anthony 
 Trollope, and have been succeeded by 
 those of Howells and James. You can 
 trace the line of realism back to Defoe. 
 With Howells and James realism is con- 
 scious and analytical. Nevertheless, it is 
 an imitation of the French philosophy of 
 the realistic, while in succession to the 
 spontaneous realism of Miss Austen ; the 
 latter answered to a demand from society, 
 as Richardson's literary pap, flavored with 
 Rousseau's rosewater and named " Clarissa 
 Harlowe," had answered to a demand for 
 a more sympathetic knowledge of human 
 nature. Richardson was vocal of the 
 democratic movement, though he prob- 
 ably despised it as much as he despised 
 the principles of Rousseau. 
 
 In history Gibbon's " Decline and Fall 
 of the Roman Empire," with its elaborate 
 pagan paraphernalia and constant march 
 of processional sentences, showed that 
 history aimed to be literature. But it is 
 to Macaulay we owe the development of 
 the democratic movement into history. 
 Macaulay says : 
 
 "The historians have imposed on themselves a 
 code of conventional decencies as absurd as that 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 307 
 
 which has been the bane of the French drama. 
 The most characteristic and interesting circum- 
 stances are omitted or softened down, because, 
 as we are told, they are too trivial for the 
 majesty of history. The majesty of history 
 seems to resemble the majesty of the poor king 
 of Spain, who died a martyr to ceremony 
 because the proper dignitaries were not at hand 
 to render him assistance." 
 
 The historian was no longer to write of 
 kings and princes and battles, leaving the 
 people, like dim spectres, to stand in the 
 distance. It may have been that, with 
 the exit of the Stuarts, kings had ceased 
 to be picturesque. And if it be a choice 
 between principle and the picturesque, 
 literature is drawn to the picturesque as 
 the metal to the magnet. At any rate, 
 English democracy, nurtured at the time 
 of King John and the Magna Charta, had 
 slowly come to maturity. Macaulay, at 
 any rate, turned to the people, to the 
 private and public records of daily life. 
 Literature was to become more and more 
 the expression of humanity, and it fol- 
 lowed the movement toward the people 
 and from the people. Macaulay himself 
 expressed his theory of the historian's 
 
3o8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 changed point of view, and faithfully put 
 this theory into practice. The memoir, 
 the diary, the letter, became material for 
 the writer of history. It was no longer a 
 question of the progresses of Louis XIV 
 or of the plan of Waterloo ; the lives of 
 the men who fought, the social condition 
 of the families that stayed at home, — all 
 these are now things for the new investiga- 
 tion. The legend of Stephenson sitting by 
 his mother's fire and discovering the action 
 of steam replaces the story of King Alfred 
 and the burned cakes in the neat-herd's 
 hut ; the picture of Franklin and his kite 
 found more admirers than that of the 
 foolish Canute and the advancing waves. 
 In fact, the waves soused the king; and 
 if a monarch had burned his cakes, the 
 people saw no reason why he should not 
 eat them or go without. Macaulay's 
 method was exaggerated by Froude, with 
 whom history became the personal expres- 
 sion of untruth. History to-day concerns 
 itself with humanity ; it may be called the 
 psychology of the people, and the people 
 are no longer incarnate in the person of 
 the king. 
 
 The poet, however, remains a democrat 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 309 
 
 just as long as democracy can be made 
 picturesque. The novelist, however, has 
 a wider range, and is not so dependent on 
 the picturesque. The novel was still 
 realistic, — that is, it concerned itself with 
 the probable in everyday life, until Sir 
 Walter Scott arose. There had appeared 
 tentative romances, like Horace Walpole*s 
 and Mrs. Radcliffe*s, but they were lurid 
 phantasmagorias. Sir Walter loved the 
 past, and a century that was bounded by 
 such an unpicturesque event as the 
 Reformation irked him. The stirring 
 Border Ballads rang in his ears. Besides, 
 the cult of Goethe had tinged him with 
 German romanticism. Between John 
 Knox, grim, Hebraic, colorless, rude, 
 denouncing the " Sabbath '' afternoon 
 dances of Mary Stuart, and Mary, radiant, 
 gay, distinguished, candid, and a queen, 
 he was all for Mary. Luther*s vulgarity 
 shocked him, and Calvin's pretensions 
 filled him with contempt. Cromwell had 
 good points for a romance, but those good 
 points were visible only against a back- 
 ground of chivalry. It must be confessed 
 that dear old Sir Walter loved the glamour 
 of courts, the clash of arms, and the 
 
310 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 panoply of feudalism. But he also loved 
 the Gothic tracery of high-pointed spires, 
 and all the old world of which the cathedral 
 and the abbey were the centre. And he 
 loved, too, the creatures who would not 
 have been what they were if it had not 
 been for the old, yet ever new, religion. 
 It would be untrue to say that Sir Walter 
 consciously began a new movement in 
 literature when he wrote "The Lady of 
 the Lake " or that more influential work, 
 " Waverley." He simply followed his 
 bent; he liked the telling of a story so 
 much that, in his declining days, the labor 
 he delighted in physicked pain, and helped 
 him to the highest heroism. " Peveril of 
 the Peak " and " The Bride of Lammer- 
 moor," Edward Glendenning and the 
 terrible Templar of " Ivanhoe " were of 
 the company he cherished. 
 
 The ideal was never so obscured in 
 England, religion never so much of a 
 social convention, utilitarianism so prev- 
 alent and Philistinism so self-conceited, as 
 in the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 The Reformation which had apotheosized 
 the commonplace had cut off the English 
 from their ancestors. The glory of the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 311 
 
 elder day was forgotten or ignored. It 
 is hard for us to realize the interest ex- 
 cited by the appearance of Sir Walter 
 Scott's novels, — the memoirs of the time 
 show that the " Wizard of the North " 
 was the most talked of person in Great 
 Britain. The reign of the romance had 
 come. Realism, so far as it concerned 
 itself with everyday life in England, was 
 out of fashion. Utilitarianism gave way, 
 at least in theory, to aspiration. To fly 
 upward was the motto ; to get beyond 
 the narrow walls of the present was the 
 desire. 
 
 Few writers on Christianity have ac- 
 knowledged its debt to the imagination. 
 They have tried, following the lead of 
 the reformers, to support it by common 
 sense, when the fact is that the highest 
 form of religion has as little to do with 
 common sense as it has with the stock- 
 market. The apostle who made himself 
 " a fool for Christ's sake " was as much 
 beyond the understanding of the average 
 man of common sense as the ordinary 
 reader of cheap magazines is below the 
 poet of the Apocalypse. Sir Walter Scott, 
 pioneer of the movement of aspiration, 
 
312 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 used the form of prose and the form of 
 the novel ; he was fortunate in that ; the 
 imagination of England caught fire. He 
 showed that there were forgotten splen- 
 dors in English faith and love. He re- 
 peopled the cathedral and the abbey ; he 
 showed that the England of the Middle 
 Ages was not the England of Fox's " Book 
 of Martyrs." He cast aside the curtains 
 of the commonplace, and the English 
 beheld a new world all their own. The 
 heroism they had lost so long, the romance 
 hidden from them, appeared under the 
 wand of the wizard : 
 
 That through one window men beheld the Spring, 
 And through another saw the Summer* s glow. 
 And through a third the fruited vines arow. 
 While, still unheard, but in its wonted way. 
 Piped the drear wind of that December day. 
 
 Men were glad to get out of the wind 
 of the cold December and to feel the 
 glow of the Spring. A return to chivalry 
 meant a return to the Church. Gradually 
 the movement grew, and we have Car- 
 dinal Newman's own testimony to the 
 value of Sir Walter Scott's influence on 
 the re-reading of English history. The 
 progress to the Church, in which Newman 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 313 
 
 was so distinguished a figure, would 
 have come, — for ignorance could not 
 always prevail. But there can be no 
 doubt that the romantic movement in lit- 
 erature, which Sir Walter Scott both led 
 and responded to, softened the temper 
 of the English by broadening their views 
 and illuminating their imagination. 
 
 In France the romantic movement of 
 1830 was a revolt, and a conscious revolt, 
 against classic literary forms. Romanti- 
 cism with Scott was a question of subject, 
 of atmosphere ; with Victor Hugo it was 
 a question of form. " Romanticism," 
 Brunetiere says, speaking of the move- 
 ment in France, " was not only a revolt, 
 but a revolt made in order to uphold in 
 honor all that classicism had, if not dog- 
 matically condemned, at least effectually 
 rejected. Romanticism is the ardor of 
 incorrectness," as opposed to classicism, 
 which, according to Brunetiere, is " the 
 regularity of good sense, the perfection 
 of symmetry." Heine makes the essence 
 of romanticism consist of allegory and 
 aspiration ; he speaks for that German 
 point of view that had influenced Scott. 
 
 Hugo's romanticism was certainly a 
 
314 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 disorder of the imagination, — violent be- 
 cause it was not only a rebellion against 
 conventional and traditional rules, but in 
 opposition, because the French bourgeois, 
 commonplace and self-satisfied, were as 
 unspiritual as the English Philistines. 
 The English middle classes that could be 
 satisfied to look on Benjamin West as a 
 great painter were no better than the 
 bourgeois that acclaimed David and Hor- 
 ace Vernet. Hugo was abnormally revo- 
 lutionary. " Notre Dame de Paris " is a 
 monstrous vision inspired by the frightful 
 chimeras that keep watch from the roof 
 of the old cathedral of many memories. 
 Alexandre Dumas was more deeply in- 
 fluenced by Scott than Hugo. Hugo 
 represented psychological reaction against 
 the classical ; the romantic France, before 
 Richelieu and Louis XV, charmed him ; 
 he threw himself into a great open space 
 and narrowly missed chaos. Dumas was 
 a story-teller before all, — regardless of 
 the probable, but with the power of mak- 
 ing the impossible seem probable. 
 
 In all things the French go fast. 
 It does not take them long to work 
 out a problem. Lafayette's sentimental 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 315 
 
 statement of the premises of the Revolu- 
 tion and the way they worked it out shows 
 that. The revolt of Hugo against literary 
 conventions did not stop with "Notre 
 Dame de Paris '* or with his drama, 
 " Hernani." Dumas was an episode, in- 
 fluenced by Scott and answering a demand 
 from France for fairy tales of the past. 
 Dumas founded no school ; he told his 
 stories, and all France listened to them. 
 They were exciting, and it was easy to see 
 Anne of Austria and Cardinal de Retz 
 and the celebrities of the Fronde through 
 his glasses. As an artist, he was less 
 hampered by the facts of history than 
 even Scott. If D'Artagnan must die in 
 one chapter, why not bring him to life in 
 the next ? He belonged to that school to 
 which Sir Walter Scott has a suspicious 
 leaning, — he was capable of making his 
 heroine sea-green, if such a proceeding 
 could add to the dramatic effect. There 
 is no doubt, however, that he was as 
 potent in the art of story-telling as was 
 Sir Walter, and he held his hearers spell- 
 bound. While he wrote, there was no 
 room for other romancers. 
 
 But against the revolution of Victor 
 
3i6 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Hugo there soon rose another revolt. 
 Romanticism cloyed, — the dungeons and 
 donjons of " La Tour de Nesle " and the 
 horrors of the old street of Paris were as 
 dreams. There was a demand for pic- 
 tures of the present and of real life. As in 
 England Thackeray and Dickens, George 
 Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell came after the ro- 
 mantic arrival of Sir Walter Scott, so in 
 France the realists came after Hugo and 
 Dumas. 
 
 The movement in England was a 
 gentle and gradual movement. Thack- 
 eray was the literary descendant of the 
 realist Fielding and the sentimentalist 
 Sterne. Dickens owed something to a 
 much lesser man, the elder Pierce Egan ; 
 and the difference in. their earlier methods 
 shows the difference in their preceptors. 
 In France the realists announced a new 
 philosophy. Balzac was not a mere teller 
 of stories — "the idle singer of an empty 
 day " — he was an analyst, a psycholo- 
 gical investigator. His mission was to 
 sound the depth of all humanity. The 
 novel was no longer to be a romance ; 
 only the probable was possible. Balzac 
 wanted to be taken seriously ; he was the 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 317 
 
 high priest of a new cult ; so long as men 
 and women existed, he could write — the 
 inmost thoughts, emotions, virtues, sins 
 of his time should be laid bare. 
 
 Honore de Balzac was by no means 
 a republican ; he was an aristocrat, and he 
 always allowed his people — he even en- 
 couraged them — to believe in God. He 
 had the methods of the realist, and hence 
 his contemporaries declared that he was a 
 realist, for literary form is everything in 
 France. But his heart was the heart of a 
 romancer. His tnise en scene is as realistic 
 as Dickens^s, but he is often as romantic 
 and grotesque as Dickens. Still, he is 
 held in France to have begun that mis- 
 named realistic movement which ought to 
 have had for its motto, "Anything that 
 the devil does we shall deem it our mis- 
 sion to exaggerate." Realism, analyti- 
 cal realism, was acclaimed tumultuously. 
 Balzac, the De Goncourts, Flaubert, fol- 
 lowed one another. England already had 
 realists as to method — Thackeray, Dick- 
 ens, George Eliot ; and a realist who pre- 
 tended nothing, who assumed nothing, 
 who had no relations with the French 
 school, but who belonged to the school of 
 
3i8 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 Miss Austen. This was Anthony Trol- 
 lope. It was truly said of him that so long 
 as men and women of the English upper- 
 middle classes lived, he could go on 
 writing. " Barchester Towers " and " Or- 
 ley Farm '* are the most typical examples 
 of English realism, after " Pride and Pre- 
 judice,*' in our language. Mr. Howells 
 and Mr. James have given us other 
 good examples, tinged somewhat with the 
 self-consciousness of the French, — "A 
 Modern Instance," "The Rise of Silas 
 Lapham," " The Portrait of a Lady," and 
 " Washington Square." Of these, " Silas 
 Lapham " seems to show most plainly 
 the influence of Balzac. 
 
 Realism itself could not escape analysis ; 
 the newer man wanted to dry it as the 
 chemist dries alcohol. Every drop of 
 water must disappear. And then the 
 Darwinian movement was affecting life. 
 Realism, after all, cannot escape being 
 synthetical, since even the most scientific 
 of the new school was forced to call in 
 the aid of imagination. Here was the 
 difficulty. Besides, Balzac — even the 
 all-seeing Balzac — hesitated to say some 
 things ; Flaubert had his reserves. The 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 319 
 
 movement of realism was hampered by- 
 prudery, and it was not sufficiently " sci- 
 entific/' Zola, instead of being the 
 founder of a school, is the beginning and 
 the end of an illogical attempt in litera- 
 ture to dig around the roots of animal 
 life in search of the monstrous grubs that 
 infest the animals. The naturalistic- 
 scientific movement somewhat affected 
 Matilda Serao in Italy and the clever 
 Spanish novelists, among whom are Galdos 
 and Madame Pardo-Bazan. In England 
 it touched George Moore. In Russia it 
 influenced Tolstoi and Dostoeffsky. It 
 has had no permanent effect, except upon 
 D'Annunzio, who may call himself a path- 
 ological criminologist of the scientific- 
 naturalistic school. Literature, one sees, 
 has for some time been forging cheques 
 upon the Bank of Science, just as that 
 bank was engaged in playing the same 
 game with the Bank of Theology. 
 
 In the drama — which the aristocratic 
 and classical French Academy and the 
 Theatre Fran9ais had carefully guarded 
 until Hugo broke down all conservatism 
 with " Hernani " — the physiological prob- 
 lem play of the younger Dumas was 
 
320 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 followed by a great horde of dramas, all 
 analyzing the relations of the sexes. In 
 manner they were exquisitely technical. 
 As to theatrical method, no stage has ever 
 reached the height of the French in the 
 last thirty years. But no stage, except 
 that of the Restoration in England, was 
 ever so degenerate. It affected the 
 theatres of the whole civilized world. It 
 helped to produce the gloomy Haupt- 
 mann in Germany and the gloomier sex- 
 problemist in Norway, Ibsen. It was so 
 brilliant that the English and Americans, 
 who have no opinions of their own on 
 art, could only translate and imitate. Its 
 force is spent, and the French theatre of 
 to-day, like Italian art, makes bric-a-brac, 
 and that of a frivolous kind. There are 
 two men in France, however, who have 
 redeemed the French stage, — Henri de 
 Bornier and Edmond Rostand, who wrote 
 the " Daughter of Roland " and " Cyrano 
 de Bergerac." 
 
 With " Cyrano *' has come in France 
 a tendency to idealism and romanticism. 
 There can be no doubt that a new literary 
 reaction was badly needed. " Cyrano " 
 was a dramatic success, not because it was 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 321 
 
 great, but because everybody of sanity 
 and taste was disgusted by the public 
 presentment of problems which neither 
 the literature of the stage nor any litera- 
 ture could solve, and which could only 
 show literature as impotent and degraded. 
 " Cyrano " has another meaning, too, but 
 only a Hmited and narrow one. It repre- 
 sents that symbolistic movement which 
 has not yet reached the modern literature 
 of any other country. It can be fully 
 understood only by those who know the 
 history of the movement of preciosity 
 under Cardinal Richelieu and the coterie 
 of Madame de Rambouillet in France. 
 We all remember how Moliere laughs at 
 this in " Les Precieuses Ridicules," and 
 how Shakespeare smiles at the English 
 counterpart in the character of Osric, in 
 " Hamlet." The chief of the symbo- 
 liste movement in France is Henri de 
 Regnier ; he is an amateur of jewelled 
 words, a maker of sonnets which are mo- 
 saics of sound. He Is a rebel against 
 realism and literary naturalistic science. 
 He and his school appeal to the senses 
 rather than to the mind ; each word has 
 
 its peculiar perfume, each cadence is 
 21 
 
322 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 intended to arouse a mood, each pause puts 
 the climax to an emotion ; if you know 
 how precious the aroma of words is, how 
 vital the cadence of sounds to the recep- 
 tive mind, you can understand why Rox- 
 ane fell in love with opaline phrase and 
 the ruby-tinted sentence and the emerald 
 word, and left out entirely the human 
 being. Symbolism is part of the reaction 
 against vulgar realism. The symbolist, 
 who slept with the swine when he was a 
 naturalistic realist, cannot now endure a 
 crumpled rose leaf. 
 
 In English-speaking countries the 
 scientific-realistic movement has spent its 
 force. Reverence and mysticism are com- 
 ing into vogue again, and with them the 
 romance. A man who does not to-day 
 assume that he would like to believe, if 
 he could, is as much out of the fashion as 
 the man who doubted Spencer or Huxley 
 twenty-five years ago. And the more you 
 believe, the more you are in the current 
 of the stream. It is the old motion of 
 the pendulum. Therefore the romance is 
 king. Poetry is even coming into vogue ; 
 the poets are struggling out of their twi- 
 light, and it will soon be day for them. 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 323 
 
 Everybody that Is rich looks around for 
 ideals, and everybody that is not rich 
 hopes to acquire some as soon as he can 
 afford to keep them. 
 
 In the fine arts we have been much 
 affected by a movement which is partly 
 literary. It was a stream flowing from 
 the great romantic river of the beginning 
 of this century — the river of romanti- 
 cism that helped to fertilize the Tractarian 
 fields. 
 
 The Preraphaelite reaction meant the 
 saving of England from Philistinism. It 
 was a revolt against the unintellectual con- 
 ventions that had stifled the beautiful in 
 England. Ruskin, who, if he had lived 
 a hundred years, would have died too 
 soon, gave it force in literature and in 
 the art of painting ; Tennyson exemplified 
 it in his earlier poems ; Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti expressed it in his verses and 
 pictures. The intensity of the movement, 
 its archaism, its affectations, almost sent 
 the pendulum swinging back to Philistin- 
 ism ; but the education of the people had 
 gone too far. The admiration for the 
 great masters before Raphael, the demand 
 of Ruskin that all artists should seek the 
 
324 THE GHOST IN HAMLET 
 
 beautiful in nature and depict it naturally, 
 the accepting of simple forms, differen- 
 tiated and distinct, in preference to the 
 artificial symbols of nature which conven- 
 tional painters had used unreflectingly, 
 were essentials of this movement. The 
 influence of this Preraphaelite movement 
 spent itself in literature with " The Blessed 
 Damozer* and "The Earthly Paradise." 
 But in the art of painting, especially in 
 the revival of the older forms of beauty 
 for household decoration, the Preraphael- 
 ite revolt has been very potent. 
 
 The clue to the romantic reaction — by 
 which the Oxford movement was vitalized 
 and from which the Preraphaelites had 
 their being — is thus named by W. J. 
 Courthope in "The Liberal Movement 
 in English Literature " : 
 
 "If we are simply and solely positive, we 
 shall not be able to create at all. The exclu- 
 sive scientific order, which the philosophers who 
 have appropriated the title of Positive would 
 impose on society, is more remote from the 
 reality of nature, or, at least, of human nature, 
 than the wildest extravagances of the Arabian 
 Nights. The revolt of the romantic school 
 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 325 
 
 gainst the excessive realism of the eighteenth 
 entury ought to prove, a fortiori^ that men vf'iW 
 lot tolerate an intellectual system from vi^hich 
 he mystical and religious element is altogether 
 xcluded." 
 
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