The Yale Lit. Prize Essay.

OPHELIA AND THE SONS OF GERMANIA.

BY LINDSAY DENISON.

CRITICISM, says Matthew Arnold, is essentially the

exercise of curiosity. Its usefulness is quite as essentially the awakening of curiosity. Able criticism deepens and stimulates the reader's appreciation. Unworthy and untrue criticism is apt to excite his combative energy. The much-abused German school of literary criticism is really at fault in that it deadens curiosity; it goes beneath the substance, not into it. "Above," says Lowell, "are the divine poets' larks and daisies, his uncommunicable skies, his broad prospects of life and nature; and meanwhile our Teutonic teredo worms his way below and offers to be our guide into an obscurity of his own contriving." The spectacled Gelehrter looks upon Hamlet as he looks upon Aristotle's Ethics. When he would deal with the character of Ophelia it is much as though he were to pick up a snow-flake in his fingers; he discovers that it is cold; that it originally consisted of water. The physical nature of a snow-flake is a matter we take for granted. Superficially perhaps, we want to know its beauty. We feel that such delicate formations were not made to be handled; we may bring our lights to them, we may theorize, but until we may challenge the genius of the Creator we have no right to destroy them.

Shakespeare was a worker through impressions. Careless of method and even of consistency, he would have us gather our conceptions of his characters by unconscious inference. Not even Hamlet was written to be the object of matured study and contemplation. To reach the true meaning of the play the critic must render himself pliable to register whatever passing impressions the dramatist may have seen fit to give him. He is too much inclined to put himself in the attitude of one upon whom a company are about to try an experiment in mesmerism, and to be over-sensitive in his eagerness to catch clues to hidden ideas. We can best get the right conception of a dramatic work by a careful but imaginative rapid reading as the nearest approach to a representation by perfect actors upon a perfect stage. Though we can understand how the work might have been elaborated beyond its strictest needs by the loving hand of the master, the interpolation of radical interpretations beyond those suggested by such a reading is a matter for extreme caution. Upon such a principle as this, one man's opinion of a debatable interpretation is as good as another's. A Heidelberg diploma does not certify feeling and sympathy. Every man has experiences that no one else has shared with him, and he may therefore find in the universality of Shakespeare a truth and a beauty of which no one else is aware. The Bard of Avon was no more either general or individual than is the world itself.

In their quarreling over the character of Hamlet the critics have treated Ophelia most unkindly. Each bends and twists his conception of her to support his peculiar figure for Hamlet. One calls her weakly colorless, and another a treacherous plotter for power; at one moment she is supernatural in her goodness, and the next the compound of all that is vile in woman. They are few indeed who speak her fair.

Perhaps the most stupid commentary that ever bore the stamp of authority is the Shakespearian criticism of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, who discovered the Bard's deficiency in almost all the graces and ornaments of this kind of writing." In his enumeration of the beneficial qualities of Hamlet-he regarded Shakespeare merely as a moral force-he says that "it contains no adoration or flattery of the sex." May we not read out of this remark that the sweet and tender purity of Ophelia and its accompanying tributes do not seem, even to a stern old moralizer, any more than a fair representation of budding womanhood? Her insanity is not a part of her character, but a condition into which she is forced.

So far as any human being may be said to be free from complexity she is simplicity itself. Her griefs and trials we can understand, each as it comes. Her nature is the only one in the course of the action that is simple enough to be spontaneously pathetic. There are persons of the drama of whose qualities we have to learn as we do those of the decaying vegetation at the bottom of a pond, by the bubbles that rise to the surface. Ophelia is not one of these. The floating lily, spreading out its budding fragrance to the sunshine, is blasted by an untimely hailstorm, and the scattered petals dance aimlessly to the shore.

The only commentary her story really needs is to follow its slender thread through the tangled skein of the plot. We need not draw it out as the ungracious critics do, but we cannot resist the temptation to pause now and then to undo a snarl of their making. We know Ophelia first as one who loves Hamlet and is beloved by him. She is warned against the warmth of this affection by her brother and her father-in neither of whom do considerations of true goodness outweigh all others. They both see dangers of which her innocence is unconscious. In her few short answers is the keynote of her motif: girlishness passing over into womanhood. She is in turn shyly incredulous, righteously indignant and tearfully compliant. She has attained independence of feeling, but has not yet a right to it in action. When next she sees Hamlet-now really in need of her sympathetic affection and cut to the heart by her change of attitude-she is again racked between filial duty and her heart's desire. Duty is strongest; she runs sobbing to her father. The queen by saying a little later that she hopes Ophelia's good beauties may be the cause of Hamlet's madness voices the royal sanction of a union between Hamlet and Ophelia and entirely overrules the main force of the arguments of Laertes and Polonius. But it is too late the shuttle has slipped ; Ophelia's thread can no more follow its ideal pattern; it must go whither the sad destiny of the play thrusts it. Hamlet's thread meets and parts from her's by chance. It is a standard platitude of the novelist that the summit of love is at the same time the summit of hate; that they are but the sunny and shadowy sides of the same mountain. The transition from one to the other is often sudden and not always permanent. The scholarly critic, the Gelehrter, would fain make much out of Hamlet's rudeness to Ophelia; he would persuade us that she had forfeited Hamlet's respect. If we must have a guide here let us turn to Charles Lamb. He knew, he said, how Hamlet could have used rough words to Ophelia; he had himself acted in the same way toward one whom he loved. But the trial is none the less severe for her who is tested. At the end of a scene for the third time we leave her weeping; the strain is all too continuous.

We see her last as a spectator of the play called "The Mouse Trap." There is something in the by-play here between her and Hamlet that is almost more affecting than her later insanity. It is a lesson that turns us back to the Earl of Shaftesbury's estimate of Shakespeare as a moral force; the lesson of the fungus growth on budding youth; the canker that galls the infants of the spring. He feels its force most who knows are there many who do not?-the morbid fascination which attracts impassioned innocence unconsciously toward wrong; not to wrong necessarily, but toward it. Ophelia is so far affected by it that she listens without rebuke. It is matter for the psychologist. Professor McLaughlin used to say that the theme, by its very reality, was too painful for discussion and it is. Let the de-humanized German gloat over it as cruelly as he will; we need not listen to him. Our principle of personal impression for interpretation is a screen impervious to him.

I said "we see her last" in that scene. Ophelia insane is no more herself than is the corpse to which the churlish priest denies Christian burial. It is but the shell which shows by its very emptiness how much has been taken away. The long strain has told at last. The dramatic reason for her madness is all lost sight of. We have no thought but for her who wanders through the palace followed by Horatio-there is a world of suggestion in his attendance upon her rather than another's-singing old songs and calling for the beauteous majesty of Denmark. She has become a prattling child. How distinctly the reference to the legend of the impiety of the baker's daughters fixes the period of her thought! It has been suggested that the songs she sings are also scraps of nursery reminiscences. Let us believe them to be none other. At the same time they are betrayers of an inward feeling to which in her sanity she gave no voice-even in the whispered colloquy with Hamlet before the play. At the end she can tell her love all unconsciously and without a blush. It is the last sobbing chord before her part in the motif ends. Like the swan she dies singing.

One has a vague impression that the poet was conscious stricken that Ophelia had been made to bear so much; or else troubled lest the tender effulgence of her glory should be left clouded, and thus had saved his dearest tributes for her burial. He touches, as Lowell notes, the springs of the profoundest sorrow and pity in the hardened indifference of the grave diggers with which the scene opens. "We know," says Lowell, "who is to be the guest of this earthen hospitality; how much beauty, love and heartbreak are to be covered in that pit of clay. All we remember of Ophelia reacts upon us with tenfold force." This reaction is followed close by the tender and wrathful rebuke of Laertes to the priest:

Lay her i' the earth;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!"

It is Gervinus, a German of the Germans, who says of this passage, that Shakespeare was a poet of too fine feeling to have caused these words to be spoken in hollow mockery. Lowell himself must have had to admit, there, that the moie had broken forth for once into the fresh air and the daisies.

"Sweets to the sweet; farewell!"