Part 21

What kind of a woman is this one who sallies forth to turn a man into a husband? Shakspeare endows her with natural traits so positive that they claim no repose, are contented with no proficiency, and continually project improvement. "Her dispositions she inherits, which make fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with pity, they are virtues and traitors too; in her they are the better for their simpleness; she derives her honesty, and achieves her goodness." That is to say, not content with being well-born into an amiable disposition, she meditates the career of character. Such a mind allied with purity justifies itself, and can venture behavior which a weak person would be wrecked upon; in whom, therefore, the attempt would be culpable. Conventional manners are the haven within whose break-water the weak ride at safety, where nothing tests and strains their shallow build. When Helena goes to court on the pretext that the King's malady can be cured by a prescription that her dying father confided to her, the King, who prefers male doctors, puts her off and under-values her capacity; but she persists with a sincerity so sparkling, a tone so prompt and clear, a will so hard to repulse, that the King perceives no ordinary woman:--

"Methinks, in thee some blessed spirit doth speak His powerful sound within an organ weak: And what impossibility would slay In common sense, sense saves another way. Thy life is dear; for all that life can rate Worth name of life, in thee hath estimate, Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, honor, all That happiness and prime can happy call."

So this ennobled daughter of a doctor aspires to wed the noble son of a countess. Shakspeare attacks the social etiquette of his own age and of all secluded circles. Helena should be filled with grief for the father lately dead; but her "imagination carries no favor in it, but only Bertram's."

"I am undone: there is no living, none, If Bertram be away. It were all one, That I should love a bright, particular star, And think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere."

Then she gives a touch of woman's petulance at being so ensnared:--

"'Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In my heart's table,--heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favor."

How frank and strong is the expression of her love! The lines are chiselled by a delicate distinctness: they suggest her profile. The verse has the high instep of a woman who can be haughty enough to crush the blossoms of this new, surprising sentiment.

She does not half listen to the gossip of Parolles. It is the absent Bertram who is drawing her thoughts to wander in the distance, to be in imagination for him

"A thousand loves, His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet, His faith, his sweet disaster."

It is a pity "that wishing well had not a body in 't."

Now as Parolles departs, saying, "Get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee," Helena shows us the originality of her character by compelling love, that is usually of a habit so timid and retiring, to put it off and become adventurous. She chides the weakness of sitting still to mope and be macerated by passion. Something must be done to justify and consecrate it, to vindicate Nature's scope: she already claims Bertram by divine sanction of her feeling. No matter whether he knows it or not, she knows he is that other part of her which her clear soul misses; and Fate shall not be pardoned if it leaves her less whole and rounded than she ought to be. Hitherto she is but half a person, and that half is disabled at the discovery. Love fills her with this rebuke of incompleteness, till she cannot tolerate thus being half-born into the world. When love takes hold of such determined minds, who are capable of willing and well endowed to confirm the will in action, the feminine traits acquire a bravery which inspires an invention not inconsistent with womanhood. She must find some way to reach the court, and put love's halo round his person: perhaps it will be absorbed and mingle with his blood. When the heart pronounces strongly, its meaning is sure to gather on the countenance and lend to conduct the purple of victory. So Helena will not have a secret, to prey like a worm upon the damask buds of all her youth. "Fortune," she said, "was no goddess, that had put such difference betwixt their two estates; love, no god, that would not extend his might only where qualities were level." She will not risk leaving the business to Heaven, and sit half made up till Providence may by chance observe her plight.

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to Heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull. Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose What hath been cannot be."

Still, with all this venturesome disposition to help the piecing-out of destiny, she is a true woman, who must relapse from the boldest project into the secret humility of loving, and of looking up to the orb around which the heart revolves. And how honest she is! for she had a father whose "skill was almost as great as his honesty." So she acknowledges her passion to Bertram's mother, as if to let us see that her action is not a plot, and her motive nothing short of womanly.

"I follow him not By any token of presumptuous suit; Nor would I have him, till I do deserve him; Yet never know how that desert should be. ... Thus, Indian-like, Religious in mine error, I adore The sun, that looks upon his worshipper, But knows of him no more."

In this admirable scene, the Countess does not repel, but rather seems to undertake the part of Nature's good-will for any love that is real enough and full enough for two.

"Even so it was with me when I was young: If we are Nature's, these are ours; this thorn Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong: Our blood to us, this to our blood is born; It is the show and seal of Nature's truth, Where love's strong passion is impress'd in youth."

Nature is not a member of society, and pays small heed to the prescriptions of a set. She does not ponder dowries and settlements, nor hunt up the title-deeds of clothes and houses; and does not snuff up the wedding-breakfast across the sacrament that mixes the blood of two hearts.

"Strange is it, that our bloods Of color, weight, and heat, pour'd all together, Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off In differences so mighty: ... Good alone Is good without a name."

It has not yet occurred to Bertram that Helena entertains for him an affection which he might duplicate. When he departs for the court, he only says to her, "The best wishes that can be forged in your thoughts be servants to you," little conscious how implicitly they would serve her. His soul is preoccupied with the image of Maud, the fair daughter of Lafeu.

"I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue."

Beyond her beauty there stretched a long perspective of contempt for all other women. Maud was too near to him, and blocked up the outlets of each eye, that no glances might get forth to scour the region which was so fruitful with Helena, to forage for her heart and gather it,--

"Thence it came, That she, whom all men prais'd, and whom myself, Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eye The dust that did offend it."

He is at first superior in rank and inferior in nature, his blood and virtue contending for empire in him. She is still the woman whom Nature has elected for him, notwithstanding his surprise and contempt when she summons him out of the crowd of courtiers in pursuance of the boon she had craved of the King, if he recovered by the use of her prescriptions. In her the voice of Nature spoke more truly than Bertram's passing inclination. As she claims the precious fee, the blushes in her cheeks whisper,--

"We blush that thou shouldst choose: but, be repuls'd, Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever; We'll ne'er come there again."

Bertram feigns compliance with the wishes of the King; but, determining to get rid of her, he hurries from the marriage rite to the Florentine wars. There was a technical marriage of two persons who are not yet wedded, for he does not yet deserve her. The shadow of her plebeian origin is large enough to obscure her merit; so that poetic justice requires that he must wait till she is appreciated, when he will find that he has gained every thing in yielding every thing to the supremacy of pure womanhood. He flings himself away to the wars, exclaiming, "Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France."

When she perceives that she is the cause of his expatriation, her decision is made to leave France, so that he may be free to enter it again. She becomes a pilgrim, with bared feet, to do penance for ambitious love, wandering here and there, keeping out of the way that he may be recalled from the dangers of war:--

"He is too good and fair for death and me; Whom I myself embrace, to set him free."

By and by, Bertram, believing that she is dead, is overwhelmed with an access of love for her. His awakened conviction "cries to see what's done." Supposing that she is departed, he finds that she is for the first time present. Although he has been full of faults, and does not hesitate to screen himself by the most ungentlemanly prevarications, there is a strain of his nature that sounded when he thought that death had snapped her string. The vibration woke the tone of Helena, and married him to her without a priest save death. "Sweet Helen's knell" became the joy-peals of her marriage morn. Then he receives his true patent of nobility; for her soul converts him to a man.

In this play, Shakspeare has followed the incidents of an old story; but, in doing so, Helena grew upon his hands to be so fine that we dislike to see her submit to a certain one of the circumstances of that borrowed plot. And we wonder that Shakspeare should not have shielded her by a better invention.

We are not satisfied to know that such incidents were very common in the novels of that day, whence Shakspeare derived many of his plots; for the greatest moments of his genius have taught us reverently to demand of him more than that he should be content to take the old threads and weave the old strand over. We expect to follow them as clews that lead through subtle labyrinths of Nature where the heart has stored its secrets. Whenever we venture with him on that raft of some light tale of Boccaccio, we are not surprised if we drop into deep water whose cresting waves admonish Shakspeare to brace and fortify the slim float he started on. We do not relish the idea that Shakspeare is mainly interested to work out a plot into a good acting play, and so takes the nearest coarse things that may suit such a purpose. It is true they have been immersed till they are encrusted all over with his imagination, and their cheapness is concealed. The Chinese drop a shot into the shell of a pearl oyster, and by and by reclaim it all cased in an iris. It seems to be a drop distilled from many sunsets; but the kernel is still a shot. Shakspeare dips the coarse narratives of the Italian writers into his many-colored verse; and they are turned into necklaces to heave on the breath of fair women, and signet-rings to stamp the sense and sovereignty of manhood. But we expect of Shakspeare something more than cunning ornament. The splendor of his poetry does not dazzle us so that we cannot look for hidden meanings and transcendent allusions to the soul of things, as we so often find in him.

But in her character Shakspeare clearly rose to a conviction that love may put such emphasis upon a woman that she must declare herself, notwithstanding the tradition of the sex, that the man's love must have the opening word. Yet, upon reflection, have not women always spoken before men ask them? The shyest and most timorous heart that scuds to covert at every rustle of discovery has already put man upon its track. Some conniving hour has dropped a softer tone into the voice which she never heard from her own tongue before. It surprises her into a faint blush, and surprises him into a sudden observation; as when a new planet steps into the field of view, and startles the watcher with one more world. It was but a blush's shadow, such as a bubble drops on the bed of a clear brook; but it goes athwart his eyes. As they look whence it came, he sees it has already pulled down the lids of hers and set them for a snare. She has spoken: she has made a declaration. With all the enterprise of Helena, she could not have advertised herself more fully.

There are many dialects and methods of expression; and every woman will instinctively pronounce her mother-tongue. From Viola to Helena stretches a whole chromatic scale of tones which do not transcend the holding bars. Helena was not a type anticipating some future of an inverted relation of the sexes, when, perhaps, even _seven_ women might have Scripture for laying hold of one man. But she bravely testifies of woman the faculty of a love so sacred, and improvised by a heart so firm and true, so inspired with its own destiny, that she perceives through a man's indifference what a man so often perceives through hers, through a firmament barred by sullen cloud-racks, the clear heaven that will be corresponsive to the heart. Helena cannot be daunted by the weather. While the storm lasts, the upper blue is confided to her keeping against the next fine day. But we shall see Ophelia cower beneath the broken roof of reason, while the heart is too weak to shore it up against the wild pother that is breaking round her.

OPHELIA.

Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, we descry the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on the horizon a symmetry, enticing depth, weird masses, and a lonely top. We try to recognize the distinctions of this grand object which has been lifted there for ever to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be minutely pictured: the shadows that apprise us of its deep seclusion veil the openings of paths by which it is to be explored. Stretches of a livelier color report to us the verdure and perfume of youth: the clouds that fling their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued by gladness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly to sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe and vague surmise. Whither will those rifts lead us? Into what places visited by nothing human, whence we hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an adjuration which overtook, beneath the ground, our feet? What various latitudes are repeated along that height, with a zone for every season! It is shaped by all the weathers of the year: it groups within itself the smiles, the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them into a distance of sublime effect.

While we are observing it, there grows thither, as if deposited out of the day, a softening tint; one hardly knows if it be light, or color, or a vapor, or how it be compounded of them all. But it envelops the whole outline, and spills over into every opening, a gracious refinement, an investiture not easily described, a light touch of gentle qualities which decline to be quoted in the dry list of the appraiser. It is the tender lady, the maiden with the delicate bloom of love and the remoteness of it,--the impalpable Ophelia. To detain and handle is impossible, not because, like some rare sphinx-moth, the downy wings flutter into hiding; for she is motionless as a stain of color, restful as a summer afternoon when all the noises sleep: she is a sentiment that broods without a stir upon the lofty Hamlet; she gives no sound to challenge your attention, and is unable to goad her exquisite reserve into any marked behavior. But this shyness is broad enough to cover Hamlet's variety all over, and does not let one of his features straggle beyond its subduing purple. She is the tone of the whole wide landscape that stretches between your soul and his. What need has she to multiply words, to intensify her shape upon the background of the action? Small need has she to borrow the saucy wit of Beatrice, to make up her lips with the pertness of Rosalind, or compress them with the firmness of Helena. They just suit the touch of Hamlet's lips when his unbend from gathering the speech of solemn thoughts. She offers them, and his cloud empties of its density. She draws off the accumulated sparks of reason, makes him safe and domestic, steals into him with content that even he cannot measure, up to the time when a father's death untuned his prophetic soul. She will learn to prattle about flowers, but, alas! not steeped like Perdita, in glad midsummer; not to beguile her lord, but to deck the bride-bed of her fate. She wears her rue "with a difference." But, in the mean time, she may neglect Lord Hamlet's books, and keep her mind guiltless of entertaining views. She would have no fancy for going to school of Portia, perhaps no taste to learn the "neat cookery" of Imogen. Her hands are well fashioned to soothe the hours when "the pale cast of thought" wishes to escape from itself into some fair, open nature, and to feel its flattery. Because she is not a character, she is a tune: she is

"That old and antique song we heard last night."

The waters will soon pull "the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death." So, for a while, let her be the mood she is, the sentiment that Heaven made her, to glint through palace-windows across the marble floors and gild Hamlet's high-strung nerves. That noble mind,--

"The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, The observ'd of all observers,"--

is not playing at the feet of a fatuous woman, with silly, pretty face, and bird-like chatter of a soulless brain, to marry that misery at last. Many a superior man ties such a bunch of plumage, with the minutest mouthful of a body inside of it, into his buttonhole; when it falls out, the tie drags it, feebly fluttering, across the ground. But Ophelia has an instinct deep enough to fathom "the courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword;" and he as instinctively surrenders his depths to that survey, which is none the less sufficing because it is so artless. No: it is all the more competent to correspond to his wide temper; the only ladyhood in the land for its only prince.

Fair flower, half-drooping, half-springing from a cleft in Elsinore's grim platform, where wafts of ghostly air shudder out of the midnight of the frosty ocean, and the fate-sisters who take the breath of heroes are at hand. At length the dreadful secret mingles with her fragrance, which then comes to us distempered. She does not know what has happened; but in the sudden death and private burial of her father, slain by her own lover, she, sitting amid the relics of a rejected love, listening across the "sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh" of her old lover's soul-chime, intuitively feels 'that there are

"Tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart; Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense."

With what a small outlay of dramatic contrivance has Shakspeare drawn the pathos of Ophelia's fate! It begins to infect us as soon as we discover that she loves; for her lover receives the visits of a murdered father. We know, but she does not, the cause of the apparent unsettling of the Prince's wits. We can anticipate into what tragedies that ghost beckons her Lord Hamlet, while she walks unconsciously so close that her garments, perfumed with rare ladyhood, brush the greaves of the grisly visitant. Her helplessness is not cast in a faint, outline against the background of these palace treacheries and lusts; but it appears in startling vividness, because she is so pure, so remote from all the wicked world, so slenderly fitted out to contend with it. Tears are summoned when we see how simple she is, and fashioned solely for dependence: a disposition, not a will; a wife for Hamlet's will, but poor to husband one of her own.

What will become of her? What becomes of the vine when lightning splits its oak? The clipping tendrils and soft green have lost their reason for existing when the wood which centuries have grained is blasted in an hour. She will shrink into herself, will sicken, grow sere, rustle to and fro. Her leaves will blab loose songs to every wanton wind. To wither is all that is left to do, since all that she could do was to love, to climb, to cling, to cloak ruggedness with grace, to make strength and stature serve to lift and develop all her beauteous quality.

She is free to love, yet bound by old-fashioned duty toward her father; and he belongs to the old fashion of supposing that a prince can only amuse himself, no matter what sweet protestations flow into her ear. She cannot believe it; nor, when her flighty brother serves her with long-winded cautions on the same subject, does she hardly seem to listen. Her answers are so short that she plainly does not share his solicitude. In fact, she is highly amused to see him play the prig with the consequential air which only a brother can assume. Between the lines there are peals of girlish laughter, not printed, as she turns upon him with the advice to take himself into custody. This amusement ripples through her retort:--

"Good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; Whilst, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede."

The old songs which Ophelia had picked up by no means decide that she was passionate enough to justify so much advice on the point. Some nurse who crooned over her, some book of old ballads, such as Autolycus might leave at the door, was responsible for the scraps which floated into her unconscious girlhood. It frequently happens to an unwary, half developed youth that things not excessive in decorum get established in the memory. They are kept strenuously secret, unless something demoralizes the brain. When madness tears her modesty all to tatters, they escape, and wander without a rag of clothing through her talk. They do not betray that she was ever less than a true lady. She rebukes Hamlet during the mock play, when the expectation of unmasking the king ferments in him with the flightiest remarks, and his tongue rides a steeple-chase over the bounds of courtesy. She will not listen, and says to him, "You are naught, you are naught: I'll mark the play." However, she knows her lord to be a gentleman; for she has often silently felt the effluence of an honest man whose manners and morals were noble. She pays no consideration to the family caution.

It is noteworthy how Shakspeare defends Ophelia from our censure while she is chanting those free ditties of an olden time. We listen to them in company with the pitying King and Queen: the air seems to gather pity to tone the rude surprise. She was naturally full of sensibility; so, when she enters in the first mad scene, entirely insensible to her misfortune, it both increases our sadness and calls upon us to create what should be her sane feeling. When that is done, the songs borrow all the chasteness of misfortune. We are absorbed in sorrow to see how distraction could violate her sacred privacy: thinking more of that than of the words, the coarseness eludes us. We are all bound up in the brother's feeling at this sight, who cries,--