The Secret Life

There is, of course, that other element of musical quality, and Hamlet's phrase is delicious for its strange, broken sibilations, but without the picture the alliterations and vowel sounds are but dead things. All the fine, rolling, organ-like sonority of Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine would be tedious without the impressions of light and colour that palpitate through the lines. For style I can think of no better modern example than the concluding paragraph in Lafcadio Hearn's paper on the dragon-fly in the volume called Kotto:

"… then let me hope that the state to which I am destined will not be worse than that of a cicade or of a dragon-fly; – climbing the cryptomerias to clash my tiny cymbals in the sun, – or haunting, with soundless flicker of amethyst and gold, some holy silence of lotus pools."

October 8.

Hamlet

Old Mr. A – was most interesting to-night at dinner on the subject of the various Hamlets he has seen – apparently every actor of any importance who has attempted the part in the last sixty years; not only the English-speaking ones, but German and French as well. After dwelling upon all manner of details of the varied dress, business, scenery, and so forth, of the different men who have attempted the role, I asked him which of them all he considered to have been the best, and he decided after some hesitation that not one of them satisfied him completely. "Not one of them all," he concluded, "seemed to me to have a clear, comprehensive grasp of the essentials of the part. Each appeared to try to express some one phase of it, but you felt the thing as a whole escaped them." Which is, perhaps, not to be wondered at, since, so far, it appears, as a complete conception, to have escaped every one. No one of the Shakespearian scholars has expressed what definite meaning the play in its entirety conveyed to his mind.

Mr. A – 's talk interested me immensely, much more than any of those long-winded mystical triumphs of verbiage the Germans perpetrate. I have seen but two eminent actors in the part. Booth's Hamlet was, of course, only a noble piece of elocution, not an interpretation, and without vitality. Mounet Sully – but then all Frenchmen believe Hamlet mad, despite his express warning to Horatio —

"How strange or odd so'er I bear myself,
As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on …"

And of his confidence to Guildenstern that he is but

"Mad nor'-nor'-west. When the wind is southerly
I know a hawk from a hernshaw."

Of course, I've a theory of my own about Hamlet. It seems to me that the difficulty most persons experience in endeavouring to penetrate what they call "the mystery" of the Prince's character arises from the fact that they read the play either carelessly or with some prepossession, to fit which they bend all that he says or does. The German critics blunder through forgetting how essentially sane and unmystical was Shakespeare in every fibre of his mind. To him the cloudy symbolism of the second part of Faust would have sounded very like nonsense. His interest was in man – the normal, typical man and his passions of hate, love, ambition, revenge, envy, humour…

To me the key to Hamlet seems to be a proper regard for the attitude of the mind of the seventeenth century toward the belief in ghosts. The Englishman of Shakespeare's day hardly doubted their existence, but was unsettled as to the nature and origin of spectres. Whether they were truly shades of the departed ones which they resembled, or were merely horrid delusions of the mind, projected upon it by some malign and hellish influence, they were not clear.

Hamlet says:

"The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and melancholy,
(as he is very potent with such spirits)
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this…"

Personally, my method of endeavouring to clear vexed questions is to make an effort to conceive of my own emotions and actions in a like difficulty. To understand Hamlet I try to imagine what my frame of mind would be if P – had died, suddenly and tragically, during my absence. Hastening home in all the turmoil of grief and shock I find H – has grasped all P – 's fortune and has promptly married M – , whom I had expected to find as afflicted as I. Naturally I would be deeply horrified and offended and greatly puzzled over such a situation. When one injects the warmth and power of one's own emotions into a situation by personifying it with one's own kinspeople one begins to realize Hamlet's condition of mind prior to the appearance of the Ghost. A ghostly visitation not being imaginable nowadays, one may suppose one's self having a vivid and circumstantial dream, making all these curious conditions clear by an explanation of hideous criminality. The hysterical distraction of Hamlet's interview with the Ghost seems natural enough when one pictures one's own horror and incredulity on awaking from such a vision.

Of course, a reaction would follow the first red lust for denunciation and for revenge of the deep damnation of the taking off of the helpless victim. One would be continually paralyzed in the very act of vengeance by the remembrance that one had no better authority than a dream for proof of crime in those one had always loved and trusted. The thing would seem so incredible, and yet the dream would explain all the puzzling facts so clearly. To a young and noble mind, evil in those one loves appears impossible. One would be always fighting the thought – which pulled the very ground of confidence from under one's feet – and yet always laying traps to prove one's suspicions true, as the jealous notoriously do; wishing yet fearing to know the truth. Hamlet's varying fits of violence and indecision seem natural enough under the circumstances, and not a sign of madness nor of eccentricity of character. He is called the "Melancholy Dane," but to a young confiding heart the first revelation of the possibility of filth and criminality in those near in blood and love causes distrust of all the world; arouses a mad desire for escape out of a cruel existence where such spiritual squalour is possible. If one will bring the situation home to one's self in this way – vivifying it with one's own heart – Hamlet no longer seems a strange and alien soul, but one's very own self caught in a web of horrid circumstance, and doing and being just what one's self would do and be in like case. Temptation to suicide, murder, "unpacking one's heart with words," bitterness to, and distrust of, the innocent Ophelia, treachery, doubt, indecision, – all are inevitable temptations. Looked at in this way, there is no mystery at all in the play if one reads it straight and simply, and from the human point of view – which view was always Shakespeare's, I think.

December 13.

Ghosts

The R – s are home this week from California, and full of a surprising tale of their experience in renting and trying to live in a haunted house. They had no idea of its unpleasant character when they took it. Indeed they decided upon it principally because of the sunniness of the rooms and its generally cheerful character. The only suspicious feature was the very moderate price; but that appears to have aroused only gratitude instead of suspicion in their minds.

The sounds they heard, which finally drove them out of the house, were such commonplace ones – the clinking of medicine bottles, the mixing of stuff in saucers – that one hardly believes they could have invented them. Invention would certainly have conceived a more dramatic excuse for abandoning a house. Also, they solemnly aver that it was only upon their giving up the lease that they heard the story of the almost incredible tragedy of the former owner's death.

There certainly must be some manifestations such as are commonly known as "ghostly." I never have come across any personally, but the testimony is too frequent and persistent for doubt. Some phenomena have undoubtedly been observed of which the laws are not yet understood. The psychologists profess to be working in this direction, but the psychology of our day is still in about the condition of astronomy and chemistry in the days of the thirteenth-century astrologers and alchemists – mere blind flounderings. We need a psychological Copernicus badly. I am convinced that what are commonly called "superstitions" are really observed results of unknown causes. When I was a child the negroes always warned one that it brought bad luck to go near a stable when one had a cut finger. Nothing could seem more blindly uncorrelated, and yet it is now known that the germ of tetanus breeds only in manure, which shows that their observation was correct, though they had no conception of germs, or microbes. It was an old superstition, derided by the medical profession, that there was some merit in hanging red curtains at the windows of a smallpox patient; yet recently some interesting discoveries have been made as to the effect of red light upon sufferers from this disease.

Again there is the old-wife's belief that the howling of a dog presages death. I saw no sense in that until I was brought in contact with death for the first time, and then discovered that a person near the end, and immediately afterwards, emitted a powerful odour, very like the smell of tuberoses. In two cases within my experience this odour remained in the death-chamber, despite persistent airing and cleaning, for fully a year. My sense of smell is extremely acute, and no one seemed to remark this odour but myself, nor have I ever heard or seen any mention of the phenomenon being noticed by others; but naturally a dog, whose sense of smell must be a thousand times more acute than mine, is aware of this strange, half repulsive perfume, which has the effect upon his nerves produced also, apparently, by moonlight and by music.

If fresh rose leaves are shut closely into a drawer until they have thoroughly dried and crumbled, they will be found, when removed, entirely scentless, but the drawer will retain for years some intangible emanation which they have given off, and this will permeate any object left in the drawer. Recent delicate experiments have shown how the violence of emotion will affect the weight of human beings, and no doubt, in supreme crises of feeling, living bodies may lose this weight by the throwing off of some emanation which may linger for a long time in the immediate surroundings. It has been discovered that many objects retain luminosity, after being long exposed to powerful rays; a luminosity invisible to our sight, but sufficient to make dim photographs upon highly sensitized plates. The "ghosts" are very probably explicable on some such theory as this. Some individuals are like these extremely sensitive plates. The emanations thrown out in the condition of intense emotion affect them, and give them an impression of sounds or sights which appear, in our present state of ignorance, to be supernatural. Of course, any psychologist or scientist would pooh-pooh this hypothesis of mine, if it were made public, but equally they would have sniffed fifty years ago at a guess at wireless telegraphy, or the Roëntgen ray, or the radioactivity of radium. After all, however, they are right in thinking that guesses are not very valuable unless one has the industry to demonstrate their accuracy.

December 20.

Amateur Saints

If there is any one thing more particularly repulsive to me than another it is the way the average clerical person speaks of religious things. One would suppose that such matters, if one really believed them, would be the profoundest sentiments of one's nature, and be mentioned with the reserve and reverence with which the lay person treats the deeper sentiments, such as love, honour, or patriotism.

A little pamphlet came by mail to-day, which proved to be a sort of begging letter from a community of Protestant clergymen, who are undertaking to imitate monasticism in America. Under a heading of a cross is this text, "If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great matter if we shall reap your worldly things?" And there follows an appeal for assistance in building a monastery on the Hudson. The language of this pamphlet is the usual language of begging letters, only with that flavour of smug religiosity and bland business-like dealing with matters of the soul which amazes the lay mind.

This community of, presumably, able-bodied men who desire to reap of our worldly things naively sets forth in the following programme the manner in which they intend to occupy their time:

And it is to permit them to spend their days in such fruitful fashion that one is called upon to contribute the money earned by men who toil! That many have already contributed is to be inferred from the fact that this community has become possessed of seventy-five acres of valuable land, and has spent some forty thousand dollars on the erection of a monastery.

Of course, there are worthless idlers everywhere, but very few of them in our practical day assume their indolence as a merit, or call upon their neighbours to support them, in the name of the deeper sentiments of life.

Hare, in "A Pair of Spectacles" remarks cynically, when asked to help an indigent widow, "Oh, I know that indigent widow; she comes from Sheffield." One knows these sturdy beggars. They come from out the Middle Ages, when it was still felt that there was some special virtue in abandoning the obvious duties of life to take up others more appealing to the Saint; more appealing precisely because they were anything but obvious.

The very name of Saint is a stench in my heretical nostrils. I never knew or read of one who was not a vain egoist, with all the cruelty, obstinacy, and selfishness of the egoist. Read the Lives of the Saints. Not one of these absurd chronicles but is a repulsive tale of an insane vanity trampling on the rights and feelings of others to achieve notoriety. St. Louis is a sample of the type: renouncing his duties to his unlucky wife, squabbling with every other monarch unfortunate enough to be associated with him, and wrecking the expeditions in which he joined because of some petty qualm about his meagre, unimportant little soul.

The person who extorts my reverence is not Saint Elizabeth, but that poor boy, her husband, bearing the torments of her hysterical squeamishness with such noble patience and chivalry. One can picture that tired, sleepy young fellow, busy with his duties of government all day, dragged out of his proper slumber to behold his ridiculous wife climbing out of bed to lie on the cold floor in her nightgown, while the attendants stood about and crossed themselves in admiration.

St. Theresa seems to have been a sort of Moyen-Age Hedda Gabler; no better than an ecclesiastic flirt. Go through the whole list and the story is always the same. One never hears of a person with a sense of humour – which implies a sense of proportion – setting up as a saint. The breath in the nostrils of these gentry is the stare of the unthinking multitude, who are awed by anything out of the ordinary. And yet it takes so much finer patience, so much greater self-abnegation, to do the plain duties of life. I feel far more like crossing myself when I look at the humble commuter, who has sat on a stool all day, and travels with his arms full of parcels to that cheap, draughty cottage in the cold dusk of Lonelyville, to listen patiently to Emily's recitals of Johnny's cut finger and Mary Ann's impudence. It is upon such as he that civilization and the world's happiness and sunshine depend. He has done a man's duties; upon him depends a helpless woman, and innocent children. His tedious, petty drudgeries rise to nobility compared with the lives of these fat and lazy grubs with their complines and sexts and primes.

St. Theresa seems vulgar to me contrasted with the anxious Emily cheapening chops at the butcher's, and fighting around the bargain counter to make her laborious commuter's meagre salary stretch over the needs of her family. It requires a finer and sweeter, a more saintly nature to walk the floor patiently with a teething baby than to pose as a saint on the floor to no one's benefit but one's own.

Ah, those humble, lovely souls bearing the whips and scorns of Time, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes – their commonplace daily halos make the saints' diadems look like imitation jewels.

January 1, 1900.

The Zeitgeist

Back from the gates of the City of Life there runs a great highway, whose beginning is in the land – east of the sun and west of the moon – where the unborn dwell. It is a broad and well-trodden road; beaten smooth by the feet of the hurrying generations that tread sharp upon one another's heels as they press forward out of grey and airless nothingness into the warm atmosphere of existence.

By the side of this road lies a chimæra, with woman's breasts couched upon lion's paws. It is the old direful Questioner of Thebes; the Propounder of Riddles; the prodigious Asker of Enigmas. Before entering the gates of the City the jostling multitude must pause in their furious haste towards life and listen to her as she propounds to each generation her problem. Every generation guesses at the riddle with fear or hope, with timidity or courage, as its nature may be, and then rushes on within the gates, not knowing if it has guessed aright, but with the task laid upon it of living out its life by the light of that answer, let the result be what it will.

The Sphinx lies watching the generations whirled past her into existence. She listens to the cries, the turmoil, the bitter plaints of those within the walls who believed that they had solved her problem a century ago, and as she listens she smiles her cold, incredulous smile. Not yet have they divined her secret, if one may judge from their loud protests, and this new generation pouring in among them has but small patience with their failure. The newcomers are quite sure that they at last have answered the immortal conundrum correctly. They have found it quite easy, and they mean to show their silly predecessors how simple it is to find happiness if one has only the correct formula.

All the preceding guesses have been wrong? – well, but it is just because they were wrong that the application failed. Here is the right one at last, triumphantly evolved by the new heir of all the ages, and it will be soon seen how criminally, how almost incredibly mistaken the previous generations have been in their foolish attempts to live by such palpably absurd theories of existence.

Make way! – you silly old folk – make way for the young lords of life who come bearing truth and wisdom to the world! Who come to inaugurate a reign of peace and plenty and delight!

The old generation, nearing the City's lower gate, – beyond which lies another road, equally broad and well-travelled, but gloomier and more airless than the one by which they came, – shake their heads doubtingly at these assertions. They were quite as confident in their time, and yet, somehow, things did not work out as they expected. No doubt their own guess was quite right; they are almost sure of it; but many unforeseen exigencies interfered. People were obstinate. The formula was perfect, but people were so very wrong-headed that it never had a proper opportunity of proving how infallible it really was. And so difficulties in the application arose, and – But the young newcomers push them, still babbling and explaining, out of the further gate, and set at once about regenerating the unfortunate city which has been forced to wait such a weary while for this the perfect solution of all problems.

And the old Questioner lying without the gates stares with her long, calm eyes into the white mist from which yet more generations are to come, and she smiles her fixed and scornful smile.

It was after this fashion our century, nineteenth of the era, came in – flushed, happy, confident. It came an army with banners, every standard blazoned in letters of gold with its magic device – "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."