"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.