John Charles Bucknill

“ Yet justice modifies pity, nay, sometimes forbids it—even where suffering is greatest. The agonies of hell, as they are painted on the broad canvas of Milton, do not excite pity, because they are felt to be justly endured.
Ophelia is, from the first moment of her appearance, suffering the anguish of doubt and wounded love. Unlike Desdemona and Imogen, there is no bright period of the character. There is gentle but real sorrow in her first words, "No more but so?" Must she consider herself merely the toy of her princely lover? ”

“ Her passion stimulates her lofty intellect, and enables her to suggest in the strongest possible manner to each person, the motive likely to weigh most. She gains her purpose, and the issue of war is to decide her rights. Blanch, with true woman's heart, laments for the sake of those she loves simply and for themselves. To her,
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“The sun's o'ercast with blood.”
But Constance, to whom peace is war, war is of all things most welcome, as the means to the end of her ambition, her
fiendish ambition. May those who seek for war ever bear its heaviest penalties. ”

“ Bred up on the sunny parterres of life, they have no experience of the difficulties and dangers of the rough thicket. The human pigeon has not even the resource of fear and swift flight to save him from the accipitres of his race. The fascination of false confidence lends him a willing victim to their talons, and under the chloroform of self-esteem he does not even feel being rent and devoured. So it is with Timon, with intelligence quick enough on all other matters, he is utterly incapable of seeing his relation to men and theirs to him, of appreciating the real value of deed and motive. ”

“ Pity, soft-eyed mother of the virtues, ever assuaging the severe aspect of their male parent, justice; pity, most unselfish of all the emotions, although in truth but one form of self-suffering; pity, that appreciation of evil which we understand and sympathize with, and therefore suffer with or compassionate when we behold others under the weight of its affliction; pity, whose Heavenly influence it is the highest aim and object of the tragic muse to invoke, is the sentiment which the character of Ophelia more powerfully elicits than that of any other of Shakespeare's female characters. ”

“ The way of the world rather is followed in the indiscriminate mischief Sweet Ophelia and noble Hamlet meet the same fate which attends the incestuous Queen, the villanous King, the passionate Laertes, and the well
meaning Polonius. The vortex of crime draws down the innocent and the guilty; the balance of desert being left for adjustment in the dark future. The intricacy of the action, and the unexpected nature of the events, are copied from life as closely as that marvellous delineation of motive and feeling which brings Hamlet so intimately home to the consciousness of reflective men. ”

“ Hamlet is human nature, or at least a wide range of it, and no amount of criticism can exhaust the wealth of this magnificent storehouse. It invites and evades criticism. Its mysterious profundity fascinates the attention; its infinite variety and its hidden meanings deny exhaustive analysis. Some leavings of treasure will always be discoverable to those who seek for it in an earnest and reverent spirit. Probably no two minds can ever contemplate Hamlet from exactly the same point of view, as no two men can ever regard human life under exactly the same aspect. ”

“ It is only when emotional expression is unbridled, that the majestic flow of burning words finds vent. It is only when all the barriers of conventional restraint are broken down, that the native and naked force of the soul displays itself. The display arises from the absence of restraint, and not from the stimulus of disease.
The consistency of Shakespeare is in no characters more close and true, than in those most difficult ones wherein he portrays the development of mental unsoundness, as in Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear; into these he throws the whole force of his genius ”

“ Timon conducts himself as if all men on the contrary were true to the core like himself, deriving enjoyment from the happiness of others. Life to him is a poet's dream of goodness and beauty. All men are deserving of his bounty, even as he is deserving of the love and gratitude of all.
But there is more than this reasoning bounty acting upon a false estimate of man's goodness. Timon gives for the very love of giving; he scatters without motive, further than the pleasure of doing so affords. ”

“ The poetic soul of Faust, on the contrary, swells with wide and warm human sympathy; although in despairing rage he curses all human desires, all hope, all faith, and, above all, all patience. In one of these characters we have true misanthropy serving as a foil to the other, to whom, as in Hamlet, not man but
man's position is hateful, and whose human sympathies are passionate, even in the despair which cries out in the life weary agony, and almost in the words of Hamlet: “Und so ist mir das Daseyn eine Last Der Tod erwiinscht, das Leben mir verhasst.” ”

“ The border country between sanity and insanity—that awful region of doubt and fear, where the distorted shadows of realities, and the chimeras dire of the brain, are distinguishable in the sunless gloom of our unreason by flickering corruscations of the fancy, by fog meteors of humour, and by lightning flashes of passion—this region his bold and fearless mind delights to explore, and to lead those who can follow him, even as Virgil led Dante through the circles of hell. ”

“ Infancy mewling and pewking, or crowing with laughter, is welcome and abundant as flowers in spring, but the living decay of second childhood is a prodigy. The delight which Jaques takes in the quaint humour of Touchstone is partly owing to the attraction which that singular compound of wit and folly has, for one whose curiosity to know all varieties of character is as keen as that of an antiquarian or a naturalist for some strange or new thing, and partly to the satire on human life expressed in the fool's sallies. ”

“ Constance is delineated with Greek simplicity. The grandeur of one great passion is weakened by no subordinate parts of character on which the mind can rest and feel relief. All is simple and clear, like the one thrilling note of a trumpet, rising higher or falling lower, but never altering its tone. The wondrous eloquence in which the passion clothes itself does but display its force. Its unity and direction of purpose remain unchanging and unchangeable. Passion is not seen except when transformed into action. ”

“ Hence all truthful criticism of this great drama is not only various as mind itself, but is apt to become reflective of the critic. The strong sense of Johnson, the subtle insight of Coleridge, the fervid eloquence of Hazlitt, the discriminating tact of Schlegel, are nowhere more evident than in their treatment of this mighty monument of human intellect. Every man who has learned to think, and has dared to question the inward monitor, has seen some part of the character of Hamlet reflected in his own bosom. ”

“ Of the petty anacronisms which send Hamlet to Wittemberg, which allow Ophelia to call for a coach, and the King's palace to resound with salvos of artillery, we make small account; like spots on the sun's surface, they only impress themselves upon those who look upon the great work through some medium capable of obscuring its glories. The great length appears by no means an imperfection of this drama as a composition, whatever it may be as an acting play. The analysis of the motives of human action, which is the great object of this work, could not have been effected if the action were
rapid. ”

“ The idea that death is past is half a delusion, half a dream, in which the objects of sense are visible while the judgment is not sufficiently alert to interpret them. When he does awake, the mind, suffering from the weakness which follows fierce ex citement, cannot comprehend the new circumstances which surround him—the unknown place and the royal robes. But, first of all, the poor patient would assure himself that he is a living sentient being, and not a soul in torture, as the fear ful dream has represented. ”

“ But the love of Constance is alloyed with pride, and ambition, and selfishness. Not simply because Arthur is her son is he dear to her, but also because he is
rightful heir to a crown, and because his beauty flatters her pride : “Of nature's gifts thou may'st with lilies boast, And with the half-blown rose.”
With the true selfishness of intense pride, she attributes the sufferance of all Arthur's injuries to herself. She alone feels and must under-bear the woes of disappointed ambition. ”

“ It is at this time, when he had forgot himself, that he explains with passionate vehemence, “I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.” That Hamlet's conduct to Ophelia was unfeeling, in thus forcing upon her the painful evidence of the insanity he had assumed, can scarcely be denied. Hamlet, however, was no perfect character, and in the matter of his love there is no doubt he partook of the selfishness which is the common -
attribute of the passion wherever its glow is the warmest. ”

“ We venture to find no fault with Hamlet; we revere even its irregularities, as we prefer the various uniform beauties of forest landscape to the straight walks and trim parterres of a well-kept garden. There are more irregularities and unexpected turns of action in Hamlet than in any other of Shakespeare's plays. Our belief is, that the poet became charmed with the creature of his own imagination, as it developed itself from his fertile brain ”

“ Envenom him with words; or get thee gone, And leave those woes alone, which I alone Am bound to under-bear.”
She will not go with Salisbury to the Kings. Did they know her truly they would never send for her. She is in an ecstasy of passion, which she miscalls grief and sorrow. The idea that she will make the huge firm earth the throne of this great emotion carries one beyond the earth in its grandeur. The intensity of her passion is almost Satanic. Her humanity is alone vindicated by her subjection to its powers. ”

“ Macbeth is no villain in-grain, like Richard the Third or Iago, revelling in the devil's work because he likes it; but a once noble human nature, struggling but yielding in a net of temptation, whose meshes are wound around him by the visible hand of the Spirit of Evil. ”

“ Misanthropy and cynicism appear to have been very gene
rally confounded.
Doubtless they are often found together;
yet is there a wide difference between the two in their real nature. The cynic may even carp and sneer at the faults of his brother men, from the depth of his human love, and thus be at quite the opposite pole of feeling to him who avows, “I am misanthropos, and hate mankind.” The author of Rasselas, that prosaic reflection of Hamlet, was eminently a cynic; yet a more tender and pitiful soul never animated human clay, than that which dwelt in the burly Diogenes of Fleet Street. ”

“ Shakespeare not only possesses more psychological insight than all other poets, but than all other writers, the sacred writings alone excepted. He has been aptly called, "a nature humanized." He has above all men the faculty of unravelling the motives of human action. Compared with his profound knowledge of the surface and depths of the human soul, the information of other great minds, even of such wondrously vigorous intelligences as those of Plato and Bacon, were obscure and fragmentary. Had he not been a poet, what might he not have been as a philosopher? ”

“ But young Croesus, brought up at home, what must be his destiny in these latter days When the twenty-first birthday emancipates him from mamma and the mild tutor, well for him if reckless hospitality be his worst offence against prudence; well for him if that old man of the woods, the land steward does not suffocate him in his tenacious embrace; well for him if the turf and the card-table do not attract his green state of social initiation, devour wealth and destroy morality. Men who most need knowledge of the selfishness of their fellow men, have too often the least of it. ”

“ Compare this perfect incoherence with the apparent incoherence of Hamlet, whose replies, as Polonius observes, are often more pregnant of indirect meaning, than reason and sanity could be. There is no hidden meaning in aught that poor Ophelia says. When for a moment she wanders from her leading train of thought, the consequency of ideas is utterly lost. Even at the last, when she has fallen into the weeping brook, she has no appreciation of her danger. ”

“ Indeed, the manifold points of resemblance between Hamlet and In Memoriam are remarkable. In each the great questions of eternal interest are debated by a mind to whom profound grief makes this world a sterile promontory. The unknowable future absorbs all interest. The lyric bard, however, fights his way to more light than the dramatist attains. The fear of annihilation oppresses, but does not conquer him. ”

“ Above all seers with whom a beneficent Providence has blessed mankind, to delight and instruct them with that knowledge which is so wondrous that it is falsely called intuitive, is that heaven-born genius, who is the pride and glory of this country, the greatest poet of all ages, and pre-eminently the most truthful analyst of human action. ”

“ Ophelia, so simple, so beautiful, so pitiful! The exquisite creation is so perfect, yet so delicate, that we fear to approach it with the rough touch of critical remark. Child of nature in simplicity and innocence—without guile, without suspicion—and therefore, without reserve, or that deceit which often simulates a modesty more dainty than the modesty of innocence. ”