ON THE MADNESS OF OPHELIA. THE mental distemper of Ophelia is that of sorrowing distraction, and is so correctly painted, as to leave no doubt of its having been drawn from suffering nature. The fair and gentle Ophelia, confiding in the sincerity of Hamlet, had listened to his addresses, and Suck'd the honey of his music vows, sufficiently to imbibe the contagion of love. Laertes, aware of the state of her affection, cautions her against the attentions of the Prince: For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favor, For nature, crescent, does not grow alone At such a time I'll loose my daughter to him : Be you and I behind an arras then ; The Queen, it seems, was by no means: averse to their mutual at*tachment. Queen. And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish The form of man is admirably described as a temple raised for the worship of God in which the mind and soul are said to do service. MAY, 1824. 21 The character of Ophelia has been justly considered as one of the most exquisite creations of the Great Master. When listening to the admonitions of her brother in the early part of the play, she is decked with all the gentleness and modesty which distinguish an affectionate sister and a virtuous woman. In obedience to her father's harsh commands, she opposes duty to love, and gives it mastery. She is next called on by him to become an instrument by which to ascertain the cause of her lover's madness. The political subserviency of Polonius in thus outraging his daughter's feelings, merely to obtain a smile from majesty, excites feelings of disgust and indignation. The beauteous, ingenuous, and dutiful Ophelia is directed to return, to the man of her heart, those precious tokens which the sweet breath of love had rendered doubly dear to her. Such a sacrifice would have proved of itself a severe trial of a daughter's duty; but the hapless Ophelia was doomed to still greater humiliation-to meanness and falsehood. Doating on Hamlet, whose affection for her does not appear to have suffered the slightest diminu tion, she is instructed to tax him with unkindness, and to assign that unkindness as the cause of her delivering back his presents: Their perfume lost, "Take these again, for to a noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. This humiliating declaration, involving at once the sacrifice of delicacy and of truth in the most senseless coquetry, Hamlet immediately perceives to have been prompted by Polonius, and instantly puts on his fantastic character, the more strongly to impress the King, through the report of Ophelia, with a notion of his madness. Unfortunately, the shafts intended for the guilty strike the innocent, and the poor Ophelia suffers all the misery consequent on a belief in her lover's distraction. If it were proper to digress from the subject immediately under consideration, much might here be said in praise of the extraordinary consistency and merit displayed by the author in developing the different characters of this exquisite tragedy. This one scene exhibits in rapid succession the mental disease, the natural disposition, and the crafty assumption of Hamlet; it at the same time engages our sympathy for Ophelia, and gives a finishing stroke to the inimitable sketch of the court sycophant and favourite. How different are the conclusions drawn from the conduct of Hamlet in this scene, by the innocent Maiden and the guilty King. Ophelia still having confidence in her lover's affection, for faith is easy when the heart is touched, and being incapable of deceit herself, attributes Hamlet's extravagance of behaviour to madness: O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! That harsh; unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth Blasted with ecstasy.+ Such is the conclusion of the lamenting lady; but the King, whose + Ecstasy was anciently used to signify some degree of alienation of mind. The conflicts of duty and affection, hope and fear, which successively agitated Ophelia's gentle bosom, were of themselves sufficient to dissever the delicate coherence of a woman's reason. Her lover's ar dent passion seemed to her to have subsided into cold indifference. Delicacy of sentiment had been succeeded by indecent scoffing and contemptuous insult, and when the hapless maiden saw her aged parent sink into the grave, not in the course of natural decay, but by the reckless infliction of that hand she had fondly hoped to unite with her own, her susceptible mind, unable to sustain such powerful pressures, sank beneath their accumulated weight : Nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine It sends some precious instance of itself After the thing it loves. In the madness of Ophelia there are no intervals of reason; she exhibits a state of continuous distraction, and though she is presented to observation in only two short scenes, the duration is sufficient for the effect; for the poet has contrived with exquisite skill to dart, through the cloud that obscures her reason, occasional gleams of recollection, to indicate that disappointed love and filial sorrow still agonize her tender bosom: Ophelia. (Sings.) White his shroud as the mountain snow, To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes, It is impossible to conceive any thing more perfect than the picture of disease given by Shakspeare in this scene of Ophelia's. Every medical professor who is familiar with cases of insanity, will freely acknowledge its truth. The snatches of songs she warbles contain allusions strongly indicative of feelings of an erotic tendency, and are such as under the chaster guard of reason she would not have selected. This slight withdrawing of the veil, without disgusting by its entire removal, displays at once the pathological correctness and the exquisite delicacy of the Poet. Throughout the short display of Ophelia's derangement, a mournful sympathy is kindled, and it is evidently heightened by our previous acquaintance with her beauty, gentleness, and modesty. The incoherent fragments of discourse, abrupt transitions, and absurd images, that ordinarily provoke levity, here awfully repress it: They say that the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord! we know what we are, but know not what we may be. I hope all will be well. We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they have laid him i'the cold ground. My brother shall know of it, and so I thank you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. That reader or spectator is little to be envied who could smile at Ophelia's distraction, which from gentle breasts must extort sighs, and sobs, and tears-those attributes From pws, amor. his plays; but in no instance has he shown his taste and judgment in the selection of them with greater effect, than in forming the coronet-wreath of this lovely maniac. The Queen describes the garland as composed of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and longpurples; and there ought to be no question that Shakspeare intended them all to have an emblematic meaning. "The crow-flower," is a species of lychnis, alluded to by Drayton, in his Polyolbion. It is the lychnis flos cuculi of Linnæus and Miller, and the 1. plumaria sylvestris of Parkinson ;-the 1. cuculi flos of C. Bauhin. It is of considerable antiquity, and is described by Pliny under the name of odontitis. The more common English name is meadow-lychnis, or meadow-campion. It is sometimes found double in our own hedge rows-but more commonly in France, and in this form we are told by Parkinson, it was called "The fayre Mayde of France." It is to this name and to this variety that Shakspeare alludes in the present instance. The "long-purples" are commonly called "dead-men's-hands" or "fingers." Our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them. “A fair maid stung to the quick, her virgin bloom under the cold hand of death.” It would be difficult to fancy a more emblematic wreath for this interesting victim of disappointed love and filial sorrow. Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, And not have strew'd thy grave. WILLIAM FARREN. ABSTRACT OF SWEDENBORGIANISM : -But now to my hero. If many a forgotten writer, or writer destined to be forgotten, is on that account the more deserving of applause for having spared no cost of toil and intellectual exertion upon his works, certainly Swedenborg of all such writers is deserving of the most. Without doubt his flask in the moon is full; and not at all less than any of those which Ariosto saw in that planet filled with the lost wits of men, so thoroughly is his great work emptied of every drop of common sense. Nevertheless there prevails in every part so wonderful an agreement with all that the most refined and consistent sense under the same fantastic delusions could produce on the same subject, that the reader will pardon me if I here detect the same curiosities in the caprices of fancy which many other virtuosi have detected in the caprices of nature; for instance, in variegated marble, where some have discovered a holy family; or in stalactites and petrifactions, where others have discovered monks, baptismal fonts, and organs; or even in frozen window-panes, where our countryman Liscow, the humourist, discovered the number of the beast and the triple crown; things which he only is apt to descry, whose head is preoccupied with thoughts about them. The main work of this writer is composed of eight quarto volumes full of nonsense, which he presented to the world as a new revelation under the title of Arcana Calestia. In this work his visions are chiefly directed to the discovery of the secret sense in the two first books of Moses, and to a similar way of interpreting the whole of the Scripture. All these fantastic interpretations are nothing to my present purpose: those who have any curiosity may find some account of them in the Bibliotheca Theologica of Dr. Ernesti. All that I design to extract are his audita et visa, from the supplements to his chapters that which he saw with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears: for these parts of his dreams it is which are to be considered as the foundation of all the rest. Sweden borg's style is dull and mean. His narrations and their whole contexture appear in fact to have originated in a disorder of his sensitive faculty, and suggest no reason for suspecting that the speculative delusions of a depraved intellect have moved him to invent them. Viewed in this light, they are really of some importance and deserve to be exhibited in a short abstract; much more indeed than many a brainless product of fantastic philosophers who swell our journals with false subtilties; for a coherent delusion of the senses is always a more remarkable phenomenon than a delusion of the intellect; inasmuch as the grounds of this latter delusion are well known, and the delusion itself corrigible enough by self-exertion and by putting more check upon the rash precipitation of the judgment; whereas a delusion of the senses touches the original foundation of all judgment, and where it exists is radically incapable of all cure from logic. I distinguish therefore in our author his craziness of sense from his crazy wits; and I pass over his absurd and distorted reasonings in those parts where he abandons his visions, for the same reason that in reading a philosopher we are often obliged to separate his observations from his arguments: and generally, delusive experiences are more instructive than delusive grounds of experience in the reason. Whilst I thus rob the reader of some few moments, which otherwise perhaps he would have spent with no greater profit in reading works of abstract philosophy that are often of not less trivial import,I have at the same time provided for the delicacy of his taste by the omission of many chimeras, and by concentrating the essence of the book into a few drops; and for this I anticipate no less gratitude from him than (according to the old story) a patient expressed towards his physicians-who had contented themselves with ordering him to eat the bark of the quinquina, when it was clearly in their power to have insisted on his eating up the whole tree. |