Chapter LXIII: Section VIII: Principal Characters

How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of Shakespeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous, irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; who, his nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear, violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses, bowlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason, which reason could never have conceived?[685] Amid so many portraitures let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all. The critic is lost in Shakespeare, as in an immense town; he will describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the city.

Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general of the army. In Shakespeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the sack of Corioli. Shakespeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns out:

"By Jupiter! forgot. I am weary; yea, my memory is tired. Have we no wine here?"[686]

He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red with blood, "as he were flay'd. Come I too late?" Cominius begins to compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet finished: he embraces Cominius:

"O! let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart As merry as when our nuptial day was done."[687]

For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a strong frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his soldier's bearing, when he is offered the tenth of the spoils:

"I thank you, general; But cannot make my heart consent to take A bribe to pay my sword."[688]

The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius! and the trumpets sound. He gets into a passion: rates the brawlers:

"No more, I say! For that I have not wash'd My nose that bled, or foil'd some debile wretch-- ... You shout me forth In acclamations hyperbolical; As if I loved my little should be dieted In praises sauced with lies."[689]

They are reduced to loading him with honors: Cominius gives him a war-horse; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus; the people shout Caius Marcius Coriolanus! He replies:

"I will go wash; And when my face is fair, you shall perceive Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you. I mean to stride your steed."[690]

This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults; he cannot find abuse enough for the cobblers, tailors, envious cowards, down on their knees for a coin. "To beg of Hob and Dick! Bid them wash their faces and keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of self-restraint, such as Shakespeare knew how to paint, breaks forth without hinderance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style:

"What must I say? 'I pray, sir'--Plague upon't! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country's service, when Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran From the noise of our own drums.'"[691]

The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full Senate, reproach him with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations. Once roused, neither danger nor prayer restrains him:

"His heart's his mouth: And, being angry, does forget that ever He heard the name of death."[692]

He rails against the people, the tribunes, ediles, flatterers of the plebs. "Come, enough," says his friend Menenius. "Enough, with over-measure," says Brutus the tribune. He retorts:

"No, take more: What may be sworn by, both divine and human, Seal what I end withal!... At once pluck out The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick The sweet which is their poison."[693]

The tribune cries, Treason! and bids seize him. He cries:

"Hence, old goat!... Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy bones Out of thy garments!"[694]

He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst Volscians. "On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and

"Speak(s) o' the people As if you (he) were a god to punish, not A man of their infirmity."[695]

Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a soul as lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his infancy to the ascendancy of this pride which he admires. Volumnia reminds him: "My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over himself, continually tossed on the fire of his too hot blood, he has always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect, like a soldier before his general, but with what effort!

"_Coriolanus._ The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up The glances of my sight! a beggar's tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath received an alms!--I will not do't.... _Volumnia._ ... Do as thou list. Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me, But owe thy pride thyself. _Cor._ Pray, be content: Mother, I am going to the market-place; Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves, Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved Of all the trades in Rome."[696]

He goes, and his friends speak for him. Except a few bitter asides, he appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes pronounce the accusation, and summon him to answer as a traitor:

"_Cor._ How! traitor! _Men._ Nay, temperately: your promise. _Cor._ The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people! Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune! Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths, In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say, 'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free As I do pray the gods."[697]

His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at the mouth, he is like a wounded lion:

"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death, Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger But with a grain a day, I would not buy Their mercy at the price of one fair word."[698]

The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the tribune:

"_Cor._ You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you.... Despising, For you, the city, thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere."[699]

Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing whilst waiting for vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian army before Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel. Old Menenius, who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be driven away. "Wife, mother, child, I know not."[700] He knows not himself. For this strength of hating in a noble heart is the same as the force of loving. He has transports of tenderness as of rage, and can contain himself no more in joy than in grief. He runs, spite of his resolution, to his wife's arms; he bends his knee before his mother. He had summoned the Volscian chiefs to make them witnesses of his refusals; and before them, he grants all, and weeps. On his return to Corioli, an insulting word from Aufidius maddens him, and drives him upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and virtues, glory and misery, greatness and feebleness, the unbridled passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.

If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who surround him and "who stay upon his leisure"; he already sees in the future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:

"... Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?... My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my single state of man that function Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is But what is not."[701]

This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes complete when his wife has persuaded him to assassinate the king. He sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have conceived: the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to an idea of fate, and capable of remorse:

"... Now o'er the one half world Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder, Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.... (_A bell rings._) I go, and it is done; the bell invites me. Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."[702]

He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, "these hangman's hands." Nothing now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over them, but they would keep the hue of murder. "What hands are here? ha, they pluck out mine eyes!" He is disturbed by a word which the sleeping chamberlains uttered:

"One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other; As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,' When they did say, 'God bless us!'... But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen!' I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen' Stuck in my throat."[703]

Then comes a strange dream; a frightful vision of the punishment that awaits him descends upon him.

Above the beating of his heart, the tingling of the blood which seethes in his brain, he had heard them cry:

"'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 labor's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast."[704]

And the voice, like an angel's trumpet, calls him by all his titles:

"'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!'"[705]

This idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous and quick strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins; all the force of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of himself, the image of the man whom he has murdered in his sleep:

"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. (_Knock._) Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!"[706]

Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is assuaged, he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage:

"Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant There's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of."[707]

When rest has restored force to the human machine, the fixed idea shakes him again, and drives him onward, like a pitiless horseman, who has left his panting horse only for a moment, to leap again into the saddle, and spur him over precipices. The more he has done, the more he must do:

"I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."[708]

He kills in order to preserve the fruit of his murders. The fatal circlet of gold attracts him like a magic jewel; and he beats down, from a sort of blind instinct, the heads, which he sees between the crown and him:

"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we to gain our peace, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further."[709]

Macbeth has ordered Banquo to be murdered, and in the midst of a great feast he is informed of the success of his plan. He smiles, and proposes Banquo's health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of the murdered man; for this phantom, which Shakespeare summons, is not a mere stage-trick: we feel that here the supernatural is unnecessary, and that Macbeth would create it even if hell would not send it. With muscles twitching, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with deadly terror, he sees it shake its bloody head, and cries with that hoarse voice, which is only to be heard in maniacs' cells:

"Prithee, see there? Behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too. If charnel-houses and our graves must send Those that we bury back, our monuments Shall be the maws of kites.... Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,... Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd Too terrible for the ear: the times have been, That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again, With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools:... Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes Which thou dost glare with!"[710]

His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched, foaming at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs writhe, shaken with convulsive quiverings, whilst a dull sob swells his panting breast, and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a man beset by such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys from his towering castle, is but a field of death, haunted by ominous apparitions; Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,

"Where... the dead man's knell Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives Expire before the flowers in their caps. Dying or ere they sicken."[711]

His soul is "full of scorpions." He has "supp'd full with horrors," and the loathsome odor of blood has disgusted him with all else. He goes stumbling over the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechanical and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death, life, all is one to him; the habit of murder has placed him out of the pale of humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead:

"_Macbeth._ She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."[712]

There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, "bearlike, tied to a stake," he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have described does not appear. Henceforth his thoughts dwell on a supernatural world, and to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has possessed him, from the first.

The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is a story of moral poisoning. Hamlet has a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination, like that of Shakespeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble studies, skilful in mental and bodily exercises, with a taste for art, loved by the noblest father, enamored of the purest and most charming girl, confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, grandeur of nature and humanity.[713] On this soul, which character and training make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme, overwhelming of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for action: with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details, the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not already one foot on the verge of madness:

"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king,... so loving to my mother That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! ... And yet, within a month-- Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!-- A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow'd my poor father's body,... Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good! But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue!"[714]

Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination, the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements," "the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and he has a desire for living:

"Hold, hold, my heart; And you my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee! Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat In this distracted globe.--Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,... And thy commandment all alone shall live,... O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables--meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark: So, uncle, there you are."[715] (_Writing._)

This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous excitement and a fitful gayety:

"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny? Come on--you hear this fellow in the cellarage-- Consent to swear.... _Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear. _Hamlet. Hic et ubique?_ then we'll shift our ground. Come hither, gentlemen.... Swear by my sword. _Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear. _Ham._ Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? A worthy pioneer!"[716]

Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, "pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other." Intense anguish ends with a kind of laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet speaks as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is feigned, I admit; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted, swings and bangs with every wind with a mad haste and with a discordant noise. He has no need to search for the strange ideas, apparent incoherencies, exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he accumulates. He finds them within him; he does himself no violence, he simply gives himself up to himself. When he has the piece played which is to unmask his uncle, he raises himself, lounges on the floor, lays his head in Ophelia's lap; he addresses the actors, and comments on the piece to the spectators; his nerves are strung, his excited thought is like a surging and crackling flame, and cannot find fuel enough in the multitude of objects surrounding it, upon all of which it seizes. When the king rises unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and says, "Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers--if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me--with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir!"[717] And he laughs terribly, for he is resolved on murder. It is clear that this state is a disease, and that the man will not survive it.

In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left but disgust and despair? We tinge all nature with the color of our thoughts; we shape the world according to our own ideas; when our soul is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe:

"This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."[718]

Henceforth his thought sullies whatever it touches. He rails bitterly before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty! Innocence! Beauty is but a means of prostituting innocence: "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?... What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us."[719]

When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it; it is one fool less. He jeers lugubriously:

"_King._ Now Hamlet, where's Polonius? _Hamlet._ At supper. _K._ At supper! where? _H._ Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him."[720]

And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests. His thoughts already inhabit a churchyard; to this hopeless philosophy a genuine man is a corpse. Public functions, honors, passions, pleasures, projects, science, all this is but a borrowed mask, which death removes, so that people may see what we are, an evil-smelling and grinning skull. It is this sight he goes to see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the skulls which the gravedigger turns up; this was a lawyer's, that a countier's. What bows, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance! And here now is a clown knocking it about with his spade, and playing "at loggats with 'em." Cæsar and Alexander have turned to clay and make the earth fat; the masters of the world have served to "patch a wall. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that."[721] When a man has come to this, there is nothing left but to die.

This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill his uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples. He belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the order to behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without giving them "shriving-time." He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle, it was because he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to heaven. He thought he was killing him when he killed Polonius. What his imagination robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go quietly and with premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can only do the thing on a sudden suggestion; he must have a moment of enthusiasm; he must think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing that he himself is poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's point. He is not master of his acts; opportunity dictates them; he cannot plan a murder, but must improvise it. A too lively imagination exhausts the will, by the strength of images which it heaps up, and by the fury of intentness which absorbs it. You recognize in him a poet's soul, made not to act, but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. Hamlet is Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits which have all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the most striking of all.

If Racine or Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have said, with Descartes: Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs, endowed with reason and will, dwelling in palaces or porticos, made for conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is developed by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond the realms of time and place.

If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with Esquirol:[722] Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to hallucinations, carried away by unbridled passions, essentially unreasoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having instead of mind rapture, instead of virtue sensibility, imagination for prompter and guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex circumstances, to sorrow, crime, madness, and death.