PE

ERHAPS it may be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that more has been written about Hamlet, the luckless Prince of Denmark, than about any other of those immortal existences with which Shakspere's creative genius has peopled the world of imagination. Every earnest student of drama in life and literature puts a different interpretation on one phase or another of this enigmatical hero's character, and every year some new solution of its fascinating problems is offered to the public.

And either by the perfect skill of the great dramatist, or th subtle intuition of genius which seems to transcend art and better nature, but is in ruth that supreme art which nature makes,* Ophelia, in this respect as in others, shares the lot of her mysterious lover. The timid, voiceless reticence veiling her inner life, which is the most stringent law of her being, and in which the true key to her character and conduct must be found, has puzzled the critics as much as Hamlet's dreamy speculations and indecisive utterances; and scarcely one has had sufficient insight to penetrate the delicate veil so subtly woven round her, and discern the pale beautiful hues, the soft opaline tints, the pearly lights and shades in which the great artist has painted this exquisite portrait of a most rare and lovely type of womanhood.

Still, in spite of all misapprehensions, this white rose of Denmark, while seldom if ever fitly appreciated, has generally had an irresistible attraction for all lovers of dramatic art, or art in any form. A list of the painters -English, French, and German-who have painted her in her pathetic madness or mournful death, would be a long one. The Death of Ophelia is one of Millais' early masterpieces, and the well-known French artist, M. Bertrand, has painted a picture on the same theme, which has been much admired. But of all the pictures her sad story has inspired, La Triste Rivage, the work of

* Winter's Tale, Act IV, Scene ii.

M. Hamon, another French painter, is the most fanciful and original in its motif, which represents her consoled by Love while with other parted spirits she waits for Charon's boat beside the doleful river. A crowd of disembodied souls, still wearing the semblance of earthly life, are grouped among the gloomy rocks and caverns through which the dark water glides. Princes in royal robes, poets crowned with laurel, young mothers clasping their babes, lovers whispering together, are there, and a shadowy form holding a branch of olive beckons them onward. Ophelia, clad in robes of gleaming white, lies beside the slumberous, leaden-hued river as if asleep and dreaming; her "honeycoloured hair" flows over her shoulders and breast; two maidens with burning lamps lie at her feet, while Eros with white dove-like wings hovers over her head, filling her dreamlike reverie with inspired promises of future bliss.+

"If thou marry," Hamlet says to Ophelia, 'I'll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." Strangely enough his words have been fulfilled, for, though only the bride of Death, calumny has been her portion. Tieck, with a want of poetic insight curiously opposed to the romantic spiritualism his poetry assumed to represent, and equally at variance with the plainly implied meaning of Hamlet's words, "as chaste as ice, as pure as snow," supposed her to have been Hamlet's mistress; not in the high and pure sense attached to the title in the days of chivalry, but in that ignoble one into which it degenerated in a coarser age. But all who recognise the deep pathos which lies in the cruel contrast between her character and its surroundings, so finely and delicately worked out by the master mind which conceived, and the master hand which formed this matchless image of fair unhappy girlhood perishing innocently in her helpless grief and distraction, and feel the mute appeal of her + Athenæum, June 7th, 1873.

silent and suppressed anguish, more persuasive of pity to those who can comprehend its language than the most eloquent words, will thoroughly sympathise with that chivalrous English gentleman who sent a challenge to the German poet for having so foully slandered her fair and unpolluted innocence. Goethe, though he did not go quite so far as Tieck in misreading Shakspere, accused her of wishes and longings and proneness to dally with the mysteries of love incompatible with virgin modesty. Even Mr. Ruskin is so insensible to the sad, sweet pathos of her character that he reproaches her with being the weakest of all Shakspere's heroines, and lays upon her delicate head the heavy burden of Hamlet's failure.

True it is that the fair Ophelia is not a strong-minded woman in any sense, either noble or ignoble. She is no more a Portia than she is a Lady Macbeth. She belongs to that order of women to which Scott's Lucy Ashton belongs; gentle, undemonstrative, timid, docile, with a depth of hidden feeling which she has no power of expressing, and a speechless tenacity of affection so persistent and clinging that it cannot be torn from the object round which it twines without injury to all the finer fibres of her being. Fitted for the loved and loving woman's place in happy domestic life, made for peace and tranquillity, not for tempest and strife, formed for submission, not for sway, she has no proud, impassioned self-assertion, no strength or energy of will to conquer opposing circumstances or combat fate. Wanting all those active elements of resistance and defiance which make the true tragic heroine, she becomes one only by being the helpless victim of a tragic destiny. And here again there is that subtle adaptation to Hamlet before alluded to. He is as little of a true hero as Ophelia of a heroine, and sinks beneath the burden too great for his strength which fate has imposed upon him the only difference is that the man struggles in the toils which he clearly sees, but is powerless to break through, while the woman yields blindly as well as helplessly, unaware of the meshes fate and circumstance are weaving round her feet.

This "rose of May," this "kind sister," this "sweet Ophelia," is, as it appears, motherless and sisterless, the sole daughter and lady of the house. That she was tenderly loved by her father, the pompous

and politic old Polonius, and her brother, the gay and impetuous Laertes, we need not doubt; but their love was clearly of that selfish, unsympathetic, despotic kind, which inferior men generally bestow on the women under their control; a love which even in its most refined and tender form only prizes and protects those fair delicate flowers of humanity as sweet and lovely appendages to the larger and fuller lives of the men for whose solace and delight they were born, and with no other excuse for being. We see that Polonius and Laertes never for a moment conceive it possible that she can have any will or opinion contrary to or even independent of theirs, nor dream that, beneath her gentle reticence and that docile obedience with which timid and dutiful natures surrender all they most cherish to the claims of authority, hopes and wishes, altogether at variance with those they expect her to feel, may lie hidden.

Without mother, without sister, without any loving companion to cheer her solitude, the lonely girl sits "sewing in her closet,' working at her tapestry, or embroidering garments for her father, her brother, or herself after the fashion of her time, and while she plies her needle, weaving with her threads sweet or bitter fancies as the feeling of the moment prompts, and singing snatches of old songs, sad or joyous, according to her varying moods. Her chamber, where Laertes takes leave of her before he goes to France, and where Hamlet afterwards bids all the love he had felt for her a strangely passionate, though mute and fantastic farewell, we know to have been very unlike a modern lady's boudoir. A lady's bower in those days was simply the upper chamber of the house; we must therefore picture Ophelia's bower or closet, as the upper room of her father's roughly built log house, one of many similar rough dwellings inhabited by the courtiers and retainers of the chieftain or king, lying within the royal borg and protected by the royal fort or castle, which was also built of logs, and was at once the king's stronghold and palace. The floor of Ophelia's chamber is strewn with fresh tufts of pine or sprays of cedar, giving out a pleasant aromatic odour to the tread; the windows are open to the seabreezes except when closed by shutters to keep out the rain or snow, and the sharp winds force their way through many chinks

and crevices and wave the tapestry hangings which cover the log walls. There is little furniture, except the couch with its silken coverlet and embroidered cushions which served as a bed by night, a seat by day; a harp or lute, and an embroidery frame; one or two gold cups and silver-hilted knives; and the jewels and rich dresses in which so much of the wealth of those days consisted; to which we may, perhaps, add such pretty adornings as female taste and skill in that rude age could create from feathers and flowers and similar simple materials. It is amidst such surroundings, and not amidst a maze of mirrors and pictures and old china, we must imagine the fair Ophelia, seated at her embroidery, while the clash of arms, the words of martial command, and the shouts of the soldiers with their noisy wassails, mingle with the dashing of the waves on the wild and stormy steep of Elsinore. A pearl of the true and tender North, this sweet Ophelia is fair as the sea-foam, with sapphire blue eyes, and abundant tresses of pale, golden hair, with slender, delicate limbs, and small harmonious features, sweet, serene, and a little pensive, not sad. She wears a red silken kirtle and a mantle of blue, her girdle is embroidered with gold, and her shoes are clasped with the same precious metal; her fair hair falls in shining tresses to her waist, and is drawn back from her brow by a silken bandeau* wrought with gold and pearls, the badge of maidenhood worn of old by Northern maidens till marriage or the loss of virgin innocence forced them to lay it aside, to knot up their long tresses and cover them with coif or kerchief.

Even at Elsinore it is not always stormy, and on the day that Laertes goes to bid his sister farewell before setting out for France, the sky may have been blue and bright, the air soft and balmy, and the waves breaking with gentle ripples and placid murmurs on the gray steep rocks that met and stopped

* The Scottish snood, the Scandinavian and German garland, crantz, or crown.

"Torn is the garland, the fair blossoms strewed," says poor Margaret, as she laments her sin and shame in the prison cell. And Mr. Millais in his picture of Effie Deans touchingly depicts the poor lily of St. Leonard's, soon to be a mother, though no wife, holding with nerveless, drooping arm the blue, silken snood which she has just taken off as she appeals to her lover for the help and protection

she so much needs.

their career. Sitting at her open casement, pausing now and then as

"She weaves the sleided silk

With fingers long, small, white as milk,"

to watch the happy sea-birds in their play, and half unconsciously drinking in the beauty and brightness in which all nature seemed to rejoice, she may have been thinking of love and happy lovers, of Hamlet and his passionate words hid in "her excellent white bosom," while before her dazzled fancy flit visions of bliss so vague and intangible that she dare not look at them long enough to give them shape or name, lest they should suddenly vanish.

But Laertes rudely wakes her from her day-dreams, and as he pours into her startled and bewildered ears terrible words of warningagainst Prince Hamlet and his love-songs, and she hears the cherished secrets of her heart, which she had scarcely dared to whisper to herself, much less to any other, dragged from their sanctuary and turned into a deformed and distorted travesty of the beautiful visions on which she had looked with timid joy as at a sacred mystery of wonder and delight, must she not have felt like the horror-stricken mother who sees a misshapen miserable changeling in the cradle instead of her beautiful and beloved darling, or that unhappy wretch who finds the fairy gifts in which he has been secretly exulting suddenly turned into dead and withered leaves? As if a canopy of cloud had suddenly darkened the heavens and turned day into night, we see her grow pale and shiver, as if with a presentiment of coming woe. Too much absorbed in the prospect of enjoying his liberty in France to pay much attention to such slight signs as betray emotion in Ophelia's restrained and reticent nature, Laertes, eager to be off, returns to his own affairs, and, as he bids her farewell, tells her to let him hear from her while he is away.

"Do you doubt that?" she asks in her gentle, undemonstrative way. And then in her voice or manner seems to have forced something of suppressed pain and agitation its way through Laertes's dull egotism and easy assumptions. Can it be possible, he asks himself, that she has been more moved by Hamlet's unmeaning gallantries than he had believed? and he delays his departure to repeat and enforce his previous warnings.

as to himself. With as little consideration for his daughter's feelings now as when he told her to look on the Lord Hamlet as a prince out of her sphere, and commanded her to repel his visits and reject his letters, he exults in the certainty of the prince's violent love, and, pondering ambitious hopes and projects of which she is to be the docile instrument, he hastens to the king. Having in his prolix fashion unfolded his tale, thus at any rate, as he hopes, proving his loyalty and disinterestedness and that astute discernment which could find truth though hid "within the centre," he produces Hamlet's letter "to the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified Ophelia," in which some prosaic critics have seen only the hyperbolical extravagance of euphuistic gallantry, while more romantic readers accept it and its most Hamlet-like conclusion "Thine evermore, whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet"-as the fervid, impassioned language of a youthful lover who is "of imagination all compact." The king and queen certainly seem to regard it as a genuine love-letter. To them, however, any explanation of Hamlet's morbid moods and mysterious behaviour, besides that which their guilty consciences whispered, could not fail to be welcome, and any course of action that might occupy him with other matters than his father's death, his mother's marriage, and his uncle's usurpation, and make him contented. with the new condition of things in Denmark, must have been acceptable. Still, the king's suspicions that something of more dangerous import than love was brooding in Hamlet's soul were not to be quieted without further proof, and this Polonius readily undertakes to give. Ophelia's conduct, in submitting to be the instrument of her father's plot, has been denounced as heartless treachery to her lover, but this is only one of the many calumnies of which she has been the victim. Though, after she has told her father of Hamlet's distracted conduct, he says, “Come, go we to the king," Shakspere takes care that she is not present when Polonius expounds the cause of the prince's lunacy, and promises to confirm the truth of his assertions by means of his daughter. We have no scene to show us how the plot was first presented to her, but we may be very sure she regarded it in no other light than as the means of restoring Hamlet to health and sanity. The queen's speech to her before

she is left alone to wait for Hamlet's entrance puts this beyond question:

"And, for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet's wildness; so shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honours."

What wonder that such delicate flattery should inspire her with the hope of securing her lover's happiness and her own by obeying the directions of her father and of the royal pair whose commands she would have thought it sacrilege to resist, and in whose professions of affection for Hamlet she would naturally put implicit trust. But with characteristic reserve, she simply answers the queen's gracious speech with the brief words,