II
It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: 'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'
Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of Hamlet's life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. What is there not revealed in his 'Here, sweet lord, at your service,' and his 'O my dear lord!'
There is further evidence of his qualification, of course, in Hamlet's unforgettable words concerning him:—
| 'Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man |
| As e'r my conversation coped withal.' |
and at the very last,—
| 'Horatio, I am dead, |
| Thou livest; report me and my cause aright |
| To the unsatisfied.' |
But that which fits Horatio more than all, it seems to me, to bring report to others concerning the life, the motives and character of his 'sweet lord,' is that he had long been aware of those fearful and familiar hauntings of his lord's mind—hauntings which, for the purposes of the play, must be dramatized into the very form of a ghost, but which were in reality something far subtler still, and less bodied. It was of these delicate and awful visitings that Horatio was, more than the rest, aware and sensitively expectant.
It is such an eagerness, such an expectancy, and such an ability as well, I take it, that are needed by him who would understand the life of any great man and would hope to interpret it to others. He who would give us an adequate study of any life whatsoever must, it would seem, reckon on and investigate those subtle hauntings of mind and spirit of which the biographers have as yet, apparently, taken so little account, having left such investigations to be followed, and that only along somewhat morbid lines, by the psychiatrists and psycho-analysts.
For these, it is true, have recognized clearly that there are such hauntings, though they do not call them such. It is recognized by them that there is frequently an unconscious retention by the mind, and a repression within the unconscious self, of former striking and formative experiences. Freud and his followers tell us that an unpleasant or shocking experience, long dead to the conscious memory, may nevertheless return to haunt and newly shock and distress us when consciousness sleeps. In dreams it is, they tell us, that morbid fears or hateful repressions or unlawful desires of all kinds return to move where they will, unhindered and invulnerable. In whatever scientific or psychologic terms we speak of these things, it all sounds very ghostlike, and the more so when one recalls that these haunting manifestations vanish at the awaking to consciousness, as ghosts at the crowing of the cock; then, be it ghost or old repression, 'the extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confines' once more.
The avowed task of the Freud school is the anticipation, the expectation, and at last the careful analysis of these morbid hauntings, these repressions and forbidden desires. It is the self-appointed task of the psycho-analyst to watch for these things, to recognize them, speak with them, and examine into their meanings and purposes, as Hamlet with the ghost of his father on the battlements of Elsinore. All this has been looked upon—rightly, no doubt—as epoch-making in the history of psychology, and more especially as it applies to the study and treatment of nervous and mental disorders.
But to deal only with the morbid hauntings of the mind is to look upon the gloom and night of things only. For, by the same token, it would seem there must be other presences not morbid; other haunting influences, not dreadful, but lovely. There must be without doubt many an exquisite or startling experience or impression, long since passed over into the world of our dead memories—perhaps the frail beauty of flower or leaf, some unearthly delicacy of laced moonlight on the floor of the forest, the spaciousness of dawn, the beauty of women, the kindly clinging touch of hands—some impression which found in us, in early youth it may be, a congenial abode, and returning to us again and again (never in the full daylight of consciousness, but in a dim and twilight fashion, in some delicate haunting form 'as the air invulnerable'), obtains at last a ghostly possession of some chamber of the mind, holds from there a kind of subtle occupancy of our thoughts, in time a sort of dominion over our personalities, and even at last, it must be, exerts a definite influence upon our characters.
For it is precisely the exact and delicate response to such subtle visitings, whether it be a visiting of fear and dread or of beauty and delight, which, expressing itself in the individual's manner of living and taste for life, we call personality; which, manifesting itself in his art, we call style; which, exhibiting itself in his purpose and action, we call character.
It is in this sense, then, that the lives of all of us, and very especially the lives of the great, may, without fantastical imagery, be said to be haunted. And if this be true, then it is obvious that, without reference to such hauntings, no so-called 'lives' or biographies of great men can be complete.